Birdsong is the product of the controlled generation of sound embodied in a neuromotor system. From a biophysical perspective, a natural question is that of the difficulty of producing birdsong. To address this, we built a biomimetic syrinx consisting of a stretched simple rubber tube through which air is blown, subject to localized mechanical squeezing with a linear actuator. A large static te...

We introduce a stable noise function with controllable properties. The well-known Perlin noise function is generated by interpolation of a pre-defined random number table. This table must be modified if user-defined constraints are to be satisfied, but modification can destroy the stability of the table. We integrate statistical tools for measuring the stability of a random number table with us...

Current models for document summarization ignore user preferences such as the desired length, style or entities that the user has a preference for. We present a neural summarization model that enables users to specify such high level attributes in order to control the shape of the final summaries to better suit their needs. With user input, we show that our system can produce high quality summa...

Josephs and Udding’s DI-Algebra offers a convenient way of specifying and verifying designs that must rely upon delay-insensitive signalling between modules (asynchronous logic blocks). It is based on Hoare’s theory of CSP, including the notion of refinement between processes, and is similarly underpinned by a denotational semantics. Verhoeff developed an alternative theory of delay-insensitive...

It has been postulated that a good representation is one that disentangles the underlying explanatory factors of variation. However, it remains an open question what kind of training framework could potentially achieve that. Whereas most previous work focuses on the static setting (e.g., with images), we postulate that some of the causal factors could be discovered if the learner is allowed to ...

A universal adjacency matrix U of a graph G is a linear combination of the 0–1 adjacency matrix A, the diagonal matrix of vertex degrees D, the identity matrix I and the matrix J each of whose entries is 1. A main eigenvalue of U is an eigenvalue having an eigenvector that is not orthogonal to the all–ones vector. It is shown that the number of distinct main eigenvalues of U associated with a s...

Behaviorally controllable stressors confer protection from the neurochemical and behavioral consequences of future uncontrollable stressors, a phenomenon termed "behavioral immunization". Recent data implicate protein synthesis within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as critical to behavioral immunization. Adult, male Sprague-Dawley rats were exposed to a series of controllable tailsho...

| We describe a general technique for specifying trajectories of controllable imaging parameters in an active vision system so that temporal integration processes are optimized. The technique assumes that a Kalman lter is used to perform the temporal integration of measurements and is based on determining, at each point in time, the set of imaging parameter values that minimizes the trace of th...