The central nervous system encodes information in sequences of asynchronously generated voltage spikes, but the precise details of this encoding are not well understood. Thorpe proposed rank-order codes as an explanation of the observed speed of information processing in the human visual system. The work described in this paper is inspired by the performance of SpikeNET, a biologically inspired...

Information extraction (IE) is the problem of constructing a knowledge base from a corpus of text documents. In this paper, we argue that firstorder probabilistic models (FOPMs) are a promising framework for IE, for two main reasons. First, FOPMs allow us to reason explicitly about entites that are mentioned in multiple documents, and compute the probability that two strings refer to the same e...

The degree of concurrency possible in an informationally decentralized nonsequential system is determined by the precedence constraints imposed by the system's information structure on its controlled and uncontrolled inputs. One approach to characterizing these constraints is to attempt to associate each realization of the system's inputs with the strongest partial ordering of the sys-tem's dec...

We develop first-order logic and some extensions for incomplete information scenarios and consider related complexity issues.

We consider the problem of minimizing an objective function that is a sum of convex functions. For large sums, batch methods suffer from a prohibitive periteration complexity, and are outperformed by incremental methods such as the recent variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods (e.g. SVRG). In this paper, we propose to improve the performance of SVRG by incorporating approximate curvature ...

We study phase transitions and relevant order parameters via statistical estimation theory using the Fisher information matrix. The assumptions that we make limit our analysis to order parameters representable as a negative derivative of thermodynamic potential over some thermodynamic variable. Nevertheless, the resulting representation is sufficiently general and explicitly relates elements of...

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