art monad - アート: febrero 2012

lunes, febrero 06, 2012

The Next Generation of Neural Networks

Geoffrey Hinton (born 6 December 1947) is a British born informatician most noted for his work on the mathematics and applications of neural networks, and their relationship to information theory.

Hinton graduated from Cambridge in 1970, with a Bachelor of Arts in Experimental Psychology, and from Edinburgh in 1978, with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. He has worked at Sussex, UCSD, Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University and University College London. He was the founding director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London, and is currently a professor in the computer science department at the University of Toronto. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning. He is the director of the program on "Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception" which is funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

An accessible introduction to Geoffrey Hinton's research can be found in his articles in Scientific American in September 1992 and October 1993. He investigates ways of using neural networks for learning, memory, perception and symbol processing and has over 200 publications in these areas. He was one of the researchers who introduced the back-propagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks that has been widely used for practical applications. He coinvented Boltzmann machines with Terry Sejnowski. His other contributions to neural network research include distributed representations, time-delay neural networks, mixtures of experts, Helmholtz machines and Product of Experts. His current main interest is in unsupervised learning procedures for neural networks with rich sensory input.

Hinton was the first winner of the David E. Rumelhart Prize. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1998.

Hinton was the 2005 recipient of the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence lifetime-achievement award.

He has also been awarded the 2011 Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering.

Hinton is the great-great-grandson of logician George Boole whose work eventually became one of the foundations of modern computer science, and of surgeon and author James Hinton.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/papers.html

Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone

Bob Dylan, ( /ˈdɪlən/) born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and painter. He has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of Dylan's early songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems for the US civil rights and anti-war movements. Leaving his initial base in the culture of folk music behind, Dylan revolutionized perceptions of the limits of popular music in 1965 with the six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone". However, his recordings employing electric instruments attracted denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.

Dylan's lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the songs of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, as well as the music and performance styles of Buddy Holly and Little Richard, Dylan has both amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning fifty years, has explored numerous distinct traditions in American song—from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and swing.

Dylan performs with guitar, keyboards, and harmonica. Backed by a changing line-up of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the Never Ending Tour. His accomplishments as a recording artist and performer have been central to his career, but his greatest contribution is generally considered to be his songwriting.

Since 1994, Dylan has published three books of drawings and paintings, and his work has been exhibited in major art galleries. As a songwriter and musician, Dylan has received numerous awards over the years including Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Awards; he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2005, the street on which Dylan grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, was formally re-named Bob Dylan Drive. In 2008, a road called the Bob Dylan Pathway was opened in the singer's honor in his birthplace of Duluth, Minnesota. The Pulitzer Prize jury in 2008 awarded him a special citation for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_dylan#Awards

http://www.bobdylan.com/

viernes, febrero 03, 2012

Knut w/Thomas Dörflein | Polar Bear Cub - 003

Knut w/Thomas Dörflein | Polar Bear Cub - 003, originally uploaded by Dan Dan The Binary Man.

Knut and Thomas

knut, originally uploaded by wazapandy.

RIP Knut and Thomas

Trauer um Thomas Dörflein, originally uploaded by ~babsy~.

Thomas Dörflein (13 October 1963 – 22 September 2008) was a German zookeeper at the Berlin Zoological Garden for 26 years. After the polar bear cub Knut was abandoned by his mother shortly after his birth in 2006, Dörflein—who cared for both the zoo's wolves and the bears—was assigned as the cub's caretaker. As a result of the zoo's controversial decision to raise Knut by hand, and the resultant close relationship between keeper and animal, Dörflein became a reluctant celebrity.

On 5 December 2006, Knut and his unnamed brother were born at the Berlin Zoo. The cubs' mother rejected them for unknown reasons, abandoning them on a rock in the polar bear enclosure. Zookeepers rescued the cubs by scooping them out of the enclosure with an extended fishing net, but Knut's brother died of an infection four days later. Only the size of a guinea pig, Knut spent the first 44 days of his life in an incubator before Dörflein began raising the cub.

Knut's need for around-the-clock care required that Dörflein not only sleep on a mattress next to Knut's sleeping crate at night, but also play with, bathe, and feed the cub daily. Knut's diet began with a bottle of baby formula mixed with cod liver oil every two hours, before graduating at the age of four months to a milk porridge mixed with cat food and vitamins.

Dörflein also accompanied Knut on his twice-daily one-hour shows for the public and therefore appeared in many videos and photographs alongside the cub. As a result, Dörflein became a minor celebrity in Germany. He received fan mail, and even marriage proposals, all of which made him uncomfortable; when asked about his sudden rise to fame, the zookeeper said, "It's very strange to me."

In October 2007, Dörflein was awarded Berlin's Medal of Merit in honor of his continuous care for the cub. Several months prior, Knut and Dörflein's daily shows were halted when it was decided that Knut had grown too large for the zookeeper to safely accompany him in the enclosure. With Knut nearing his first birthday, his zookeeper was barred from physical contact with the bear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_D%C3%B6rflein