Central London. He spotted an antique pen shop, and wanted to stop in. It was 1998, and we were in town to meet with some folks helping to build the digital dome system for the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History, to open in 2000. It turns out that Tyson is an antique pen buff. He's also a lateral thinker, and looking at the old fountain pens and pencils go...

Informative Art display systems have been proposed to provide users with information considered relevant at arbitrary points of work or living engagement, originating from many different –mostly geographically dislocated– sources and presented at the periphery of human (visual) perception. Having the displays operate at the periphery of a user's attention allows other user tasks to sustain prim...

There are certain families of words and word sequences (words in the generators of a two-generator group) that arise frequently in the Teichmüller theory of hyperbolic three-manifolds and Kleinian and Fuchsian groups and in the discreteness problem for two generator matrix groups. We survey some of the families of such words and sequences: the semigroup of so called good words of Gehring-Martin...

Selecting a subset of genes with strong discriminative power is a very important step in classification problems based on gene expression data. Lasso and Dantzig selector are known to have automatic variable selection ability in linear regression analysis. This paper applies Lasso and Dantzig selector to select the most informative genes for representing the probability of an example being posi...

When a posterior distribution has multiple modes, unconditional expectations, such as the posterior mean, may not offer informative summaries of the distribution. Motivated by this problem, we propose to decompose the sample space of a multimodal distribution into domains of attraction of local modes. Domain-based representations are defined to summarize the probability masses of and conditiona...

Pigeons home along idiosyncratic habitual routes from familiar locations. It has been suggested that memorized visual landmarks underpin this route learning. However, the inability to experimentally alter the landscape on large scales has hindered the discovery of the particular features to which birds attend. Here, we present a method for objectively classifying the most informative regions of...

The identification of informative genes is very important in study of genomics. This task can be interpreted as searching a subset of genes such that an optimal “ratio of quality to price” is achieved. The “quality” refers to the discrimination power of genes and the “price” means the redundancy involved. This problem is NP hard. In contrast to many other methods, we discretize the gene express...

An indoor navigating agent needs to efficiently understand the geometric structure of its local environment in order to act. A common scene understanding approach is to generate a set of hypotheses about the geometric structure of the indoor environment and then test the hypotheses to select the one with the highest rank, from a single image [1, 4, 5, 6] or from a continuous stream of images (e...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Industrial Liaison Program entitled “Networks and Learning.” The topic was neural networks, their power, potential, and promise. A dozen distinguished professors and researchers presented informative and entertaining talks to an audience of technically minded business executives and industrial researchers who subscribe to MIT’s popular series of sympo...