Independent Representation Research Articles

Multivoxel codes for representing and integrating acoustic features in human cortex

Using fMRI and multivariate pattern analysis, we determined whether spectral and temporal acoustic features are represented by independent or integrated multivoxel codes in human cortex. Listeners heard band-pass noise varying in frequency (spectral) and amplitude-modulation (AM) rate (temporal) features. In the superior temporal plane, changes in multivoxel activity due to frequency were largely invariant with respect to AM rate (and vice versa), consistent with an independent representation. In contrast, in posterior parietal cortex, multivoxel representation was exclusively integrated and tuned to specific conjunctions of frequency and AM features (albeit weakly). Direct between-region comparisons show that whereas independent coding of frequency weakened with increasing levels of the hierarchy, such a progression for AM and integrated coding was less fine-grained and only evident in the higher hierarchical levels from non-core to parietal cortex (with AM coding weakening and integrated coding strengthening). Our findings support the notion that primary auditory cortex can represent spectral and temporal acoustic features in an independent fashion and suggest a role for parietal cortex in feature integration and the structuring of sensory input.

Visual working memory capacity is limited by two systems that change across lifespan

• Visual working memory capacity is limited by two systems. • Hemispheric specific representational systems establish visual representations. • The active maintenance system sustains representations in absence of stimuli. • The active maintenance cannot support the full capacity of both representational systems. • The capacities of both systems change throughout development and healthy aging. To better understand the sources of visual working memory limitations we explore the possibility that its capacity is limited by two systems: a representational system that enables formation of independent representations of visual objects, and an active maintenance system that enables sustained activation of the established representations in the absence of external stimuli. A total of 392 participants took part in four experiments in which they were asked to maintain orientation of items presented to the left, right or both visual hemifields. In all four experiments participants were able to maintain more items when they were distributed across both versus one visual hemifield, consistent with the proposal that bilateral display enables utilization of representational capacities of both hemispheres. Bilateral capacity, however, did not reach the combined representational potential of both hemispheres, indicating that the capacity is further limited by a second, unitary active maintenance system. Our study further suggests that both systems’ capacities change throughout the lifespan very similarly. They both increase through development, reach a peak at the same age and decrease in healthy aging. This indicates that systems beyond executive processes, which receive most attention in the literature, are contributing to the decline in working memory in healthy aging.

PARTY AND INDEPENDENT-INDIVIDUAL REPRESENTATION IN THE MECHANISM OF ENSURING THE DEMOCRATIC MANDATE OF THE POPULAR TRUST IN A CONSTITUTIONAL STATE

The party system in contemporary Russia has a number of features that should be taken into account in the course of the legal research and search for the optimal correlation of party and independent (individual) representation in the constitutional mechanism of the popular trust mandate. In our opinion, it is the features of the Russian party system at the present stage of its historical development, not multiparty as such, that determine the main vector of constitutional-legal regulation of these public relations and the relevant assessment of this phenomenon in Russian legal science. The research methodology is based on a comparative legal method that allowed the comparison of party and independent representation in the popular representation system. The use of the historical and legal method is determined by the need to identify the features of the development of the party system in modern Russia through the prism of historical facts. The forecasting method has allowed determining the prospects of further development of the Russian political system. The constitutional system of the Russian Federation over the past decades has demonstrated a very decisive rejection of the one-party ideological system and the transition to the nascent but steadily developing multiparty system. As the real multiparty system and political competition become stronger, the individual-independent form of popular representation will give way to the party mandate of popular trust until the institution of “independent” single-member deputies becomes a thing of the past, not only in the State Duma, but also in the legislative (representative) bodies of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation. “Independent-individual” national representation is more preferably for the local government, that is non-partisan national representation (in the general federal sense). By its constitutional and legal nature, the municipal popular representation is “independent and individual” in relation to political parties.

Sending Agents to the Principal’s Office: How Talent Agency Packaging and Producing Breach the Fiduciary Duties Agents Owe Their Artist-Clients

Author(s): Smith, Brian T. | Abstract: Talent agents have always been indispensable to writers, actors, and other creative workers in the entertainment industry, providing independent representation to their artist-clients in dealings with sophisticated corporate employers. But following a historical shift in their revenues from commissioning clients to lucrative television packaging fees, the power and profits of the biggest agencies grew exponentially. Revenues from packaging fees allowed these agencies to diversify into other businesses and attracted outside investment by private equity firms leading to further vertical integration. Now, the largest agencies have turned their eye toward a new revenue stream: producing and owning content through agency-affiliate production companies. These innovations have come at the cost of the independent representation agents are supposed to provide their clients. Packaging and producing by talent agencies and their affiliates breach the well-established fiduciary duties agents owe their clients under the law by aligning the agency’s own interests with the interests of its clients’ employers. Outside investment in the agencies only exacerbates these conflicts. These departures from traditional agenting undermine the avowed purpose of the California Talent Agencies Act: to protect vulnerable artists from the conflicted practices of their agents. While these issues are at the heart of the ongoing industry dispute between the Writers Guild of America and the big agencies, their importance should concern all agency clients and their unions. The California Legislature should amend the outdated Talent Agencies Act to enumerate and reaffirm the fiduciary duties talent agents owe their clients under common law and prevent the erosion of legal protections for creative workers in one of the state’s largest and most important industries.

Deep Learning Based Analysis of Breast Cancer Using Advanced Ensemble Classifier and Linear Discriminant Analysis

In the recent past, the Classifiers are based on genetic signatures in which many microarray studies are analyzed to predict medical results for cancer patients. However, the Signatures from different studies have been benefitted with low-intensity ratio during the classification of individual datasets has been considered as a significant point of research in the present scenario. Hence to overcome the above-discussed issue, this paper provides a Deep Learning Framework that combines an algorithm of necessary processing of Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Auto Encoder (AE) Neural Network to classify different features within the profile of gene expression. Hence, an advanced ensemble classification has been developed based on the Deep Learning (DL) algorithm to assess the clinical outcome of breast cancer. Furthermore, numerous independent breast cancer datasets and representations of the signature gene, including the primary method, have been evaluated for the optimization parameters. Finally, the experiment results show that the suggested deep learning frameworks achieve 98.27% accuracy than many other techniques such as genomic data and pathological images with multiple kernel learning (GPMKL), Multi-Layer Perception (MLP), Deep Learning Diagnosis (DLD), and Spatiotemporal Wavelet Kinetics (SWK).

AttractRank: District Attraction Ranking Analysis Based on Taxi Big Data

The city's district attraction ranking plays an essential role in the city's government because it can be used to reveal the city's district attraction and, thus, help government make decisions for urban planning in terms of the smart city. The traditional methods for urban planning mainly rely on the district's GDP, employment rate, population density, information from questionnaire surveys, and so on. However, as a comparison, such information is becoming relatively less informative as the explosion of an increasing amount of urban data. What is more, there is a serious shortcoming in these methods, i.e., they are independent representations of the attraction of a district and do not take into account the interaction among districts. With the development of urban computing, it is possible to make good use of urban data for urban planning. To this end, based on taxi big data obtained from Guangzhou, China, this article proposes a district attraction ranking approach called AttractRank, which for the first time uses taxi big data for district ranking. An application system is developed for demonstration purposes. First, the entire Guangzhou city is divided into a number of districts by using constrained K-means. Second, the original PageRank algorithm is extended to integrate with the taxi's origin–destination ( $OD$ ) points to establish the $OD$ matrix, whereby the attraction ranking of each district can be calculated. Finally, by visualizing the results and case studies obtained from AttractRank, we can successfully obtain the pattern of how attractions of districts change over time and interesting discoveries on urban lives; therefore, it has wide applications in urban planning and urban data mining.

What do children know about German verb prefixes?

Abstract Not much is known about how children cope with the task of acquiring the complex, polyfunctional, and often abstract and idiosyncratic system of German verbal prefixes. This paper presents an experimental study on children’s knowledge, i.e. their morphological and semantic awareness, of the five verbal prefixes be‑, ent‑, er‑, ver‑, and zer‑ in preschool age and early school age. The experiment combines a decision and a definition task involving canonical and novel prefix verbs, and it examines the influence of context on the recognition of the verbs. The results of the study show that, in general, the knowledge of prefix verbs increases significantly between 6 and 8 years. Preschoolers have preliminary, but still very labile representations of the five verbal prefixes, school children have established much more independent representations, however, the lexical knowledge they have about prefixes and prefixed verbs is still fragmentary. The five prefixes under investigation differ considerably with respect to their morpho-semantic transparency. Higher transparency results in good passive knowledge of the prefixes, even when they are rarely used by the children spontaneously, such as the infrequent, but semantically salient prefix ent- (ent-kommen ‘escape’), that is much better known to children than spontaneous speech data would suggest.

Reaction channel contributions to the helion optical potential

Background: The well-established coupled channel and coupled reaction channel processes contributing to direct reactions make particular contributions to elastic scattering that are absent from local density folding models. Very little has been established concerning the contribution of these processes to the optical model potentials (OMPs) for $^{3}\mathrm{He}$ scattering. For studying such processes, spin-saturated closed shell nuclei such as $^{16}\mathrm{O}$ and $^{40}\mathrm{Ca}$ are particularly suitable target nuclei and the ($^{3}\mathrm{He}$, $^{4}\mathrm{He}$) reaction is easily handled within conventional reaction theory because it avoids complications such as breakup.Purpose: To establish and characterize the contribution to the $^{3}\mathrm{He}$-nucleus interaction generated by coupling to neutron pickup (outgoing $^{4}\mathrm{He}$) channels; also to study the contribution of collective states and identify effects of dynamical nonlocality from these couplings.Methods: Coupled reaction channel (CRC) calculations, including coupling to collective states, will provide the elastic channel $S$-matrix ${S}_{lj}$ resulting from the included processes. Inversion of ${S}_{lj}$ will produce the local potential that yields, in a single channel calculation, the elastic scattering observables from the coupled channel calculation. Subtracting the bare potential from the CRC calculations yields a local and $l$-independent representation of the dynamical polarization potential (DPP). From the DPPs, because of a range of combinations of channel couplings, the influence of dynamically generated nonlocality can be identified.Results: Coupling to $^{4}\mathrm{He}$ channels systematically induces repulsion and absorption in the $^{3}\mathrm{He}$ OMP and also a reduction in the rms radius of the real part. The repulsion and absorption is less for $^{208}\mathrm{Pb}$ than for the lighter target nuclei although the qualitative effects, including the general undularity of the DPPs, are similar for all cases; therefore coupling to these channels cannot be represented by renormalizing folding model potentials. Evidence is presented for substantial dynamical nonlocality of the induced DPPs; for $^{40}\mathrm{Ca}$ this modifies direct reaction angular distributions. The local equivalent DPPs for individual couplings cannot be added to give the overall DPP for the complete set of couplings. For the $^{208}\mathrm{Pb}$ case, channel coupling reduces the reaction cross section although it increases it for $^{16}\mathrm{O}$, with $^{40}\mathrm{Ca}$ an intermediate case.Conclusions: The DPPs established here strongly challenge the notion that folding models, in particular local density models, provide a satisfactory description of elastic scattering of $^{3}\mathrm{He}$ from nuclei. Coupling to neutron pickup channels induces dynamical nonlocality in the $^{3}\mathrm{He}$ OMP with implications for direct reactions involving $^{3}\mathrm{He}$. Departures from a smooth radial form for the $^{3}\mathrm{He}$ OMP should be apparent in good fits to suitable elastic scattering data.

Discovering influential factors in variational autoencoders

In the field of machine learning, it is still a critical issue to identify and supervise the learned representation without manually intervening or intuition assistance to extract useful knowledge or serve for the downstream tasks. In this work, we focus on supervising the influential factors extracted by the variational autoencoder (VAE). The VAE is proposed to learn independent low dimension representation while facing the problem that sometimes pre-set factors are ignored. We argue that the mutual information of the input and each learned factor of the representation plays a necessary indicator of discovering the influential factors. We find the VAE objective inclines to induce mutual information sparsity in factor dimension over the data intrinsic dimension and therefore result in some non-influential factors whose function on data reconstruction could be ignored. We show mutual information also influences the lower bound of VAE’s reconstruction error and downstream classification task. To make such indicator applicable, we design an algorithm for calculating the mutual information for VAE and prove its consistency. Experimental results on MNIST, CelebA and DEAP datasets show that mutual information can help determine influential factors, of which some are interpretable and can be used to further generation and classification tasks, and help discover the variant that connects with emotion on DEAP dataset.

The heuristic value of autobiographies for gender studies: comparing the theoretical results of Russian and foreign studies

Heuristic value of autobiographies for specialists in gender and female studies (based on the comparison of theoretical results of Russian and international autobiographical studies). The article discusses the qualitative changes in the study of autobiographies in historical works. The author focuses on the importance of gender studies in the field of complex relations between various approaches, including the philosophical, psychological, and linguistic way of analyzing life histories, in general, and women’s autobiographies, in particular (which comprises using the theory of female writing created by French feminist philosophers), as well as old and recent literature in the field of autobiographical research. The gender approach to the analysis of documents makes it possible to conclude that men report less about their family and private life and tend to give this life a different meaning and place in the system of value hierarchies. The second conclusion when comparing male and female autobiographies is the individualized and independent representation of the ego in life stories. Analysts point out that when collecting material about men’s lives, it is the gender of the story collector that is important. When talking to a female interviewer, the narrator presents the same life events in a different way than to male interviewer. When reading an egotext, a male analyst immediately forms a male community and, at the same time, hierarchies typical of relations between men. Keywords: autobiography, women, gender, gender history, history methodology, biographi- cal research, memory psychology, historiography

Cortical collateralization induced by language and arithmetic in non-right-handers

The functional overlap of language and arithmetic is debatable. Although some studies have reported independent representations of arithmetic and language in the brain, other studies have reported shared activity of the two cognitive domains in the inferior frontal gyrus. Although most previous studies have evaluated right-handed individuals, variability of hemispheric dominance in non-right-handed individuals should provide important information on the functional collateralization of these two cognitive domains. The present study evaluated the cortical lateralization patterns of the two cognitive domains using functional magnetic resonance imaging in 30 non-right-handed participants who performed language and arithmetic tasks. We found that language and arithmetic tasks demonstrated shared activity in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Furthermore, the lateralization patterns of language and arithmetic tasks were correlated with each other. Most participants with language dominance in the left hemisphere also exhibited dominance of arithmetic tasks in the left hemisphere; similarly, most participants with language dominance in the right hemisphere exhibited dominance of arithmetic tasks in the right hemisphere. Among all the brain regions, the precentral gyrus, which is located slightly posterior to the IFG, exhibited the highest correlation coefficient between laterality indices of language and arithmetic tasks. These results suggest a shared functional property between language and arithmetic in the brain.

Multimodal Object-Based Environment Representation for Assistive Robotics

Autonomous robots are nowadays successfully used in industrial environments, where tasks follow predetermined plans and the world is a known (and closed) set of objects. The context of social robotics brings new challenges to the robot. First of all, the world is no longer closed. New objects can be introduced at any time, and it is now impossible to build an exaustive list of them nor having a precomputed set of descriptors. Moreover, natural interactions with a human being don’t follow any precomputed graph of sequences or grammar. To deal with the complexity of such an open world, a robot can no longer solely rely on its sensors data: a compact representation to comprehend its surrounding is needed. Our approach focuses on task independent environment representation where human-robot interactions are involved. We propose a global architecture bridging the gap between perception and semantic modalities through instances (physical realizations of semantic concepts). In this article, we describe a method for automatic generation of object-related ontology. Based on it, a practical formalization of the ill-defined notion of “context” is discussed. We then tackle human-robot interactions in our system through the description of user request processing. Finally, we illustrate the flow of our model on two showcases which demonstrate the validity of the approach.

Improving justice responses for victims of intimate partner violence: examining the merits of the provision of independent legal representation

ABSTRACT Justice processes have long been criticised for their inability to meet the needs of intimate partner violence victims and provide remedies that facilitate recovery. Despite a bevy of victim-oriented reforms, victims continue to report dissatisfaction in their engagement with the legal process. Recognising the failures of policy responses to date, the Royal Commission into Family Violence (2016) in Victoria, Australia, sought to reimagine justice responses to victims of intimate partner violence through innovative models of reform, such as the introduction of legal representation for victims in court. In the absence of prescribed detail as to how this could be achieved, this article contends that there is a need to tread cautiously in this space. It sets out the potential benefits from trialling legal representation for victims in emerging Victorian specialist family violence courts, as well as the perceived risks that should be kept in mind prior to instituting state wide reform.

The representation of plural inflectional affixes in English: evidence from priming in an auditory lexical decision task

ABSTRACTThe representation of inflection is controversial: theories of morphological processing range from those that treat all inflectional morphemes as independently represented in memory to those that deny independent representation for any inflectional morphemes. Whereas identity priming for stems and derivational affixes is regularly reported, priming of inflectional affixes is understudied and has produced no clear consensus. This paper reports results from a continuous auditory lexical decision task investigating priming of plural inflectional affixes in English, in plural prime-target pairs such as crimestrees. Our results show statistically significant priming facilitation for plural primes relative to phonological (cleansetrees) and singular (crimetrees) controls. This finding indicates that inflectional affixes, like lexical stems, exhibit identity priming effects. We discuss implications for morphological theory and point to questions for further work addressing which representation(s) produce the priming effect.

Optimization proposal for emulsions formulation considering a multiscale approach

The design of higher value-added products involves the evaluation of different formulation alternatives, while simultaneously addressing product structure and functionalities, manufacturing process, and market requirements. Mathematical programming approaches have proven to be suitable means to reduce experimentation resources and development time; however, the integration of the diverse design variables and constraints establish a challenging modeling task that includes the implementation of multiple simulation software. This paper presents an optimization proposal for emulsions formulation considering a multiscale approach based on mathematical programming and independent modular representation of the (1) product structure and properties, (2) consumer requirements and (3) product market performance. This proposal was developed in Pyomo in order to provide a generic, highly configurable and modular open-source environment for the solution of multiscale design problems, allowing the combination of diverse mathematical models. Two emulsion design cases are presented to highlight the application of the optimization model to find the best formulation related to multiscale properties. The first case consists of the maximization of consumer preference, while the second case involves the maximization of economic revenue. According to the optimization proposal implementation, the results show that the economic-driven formulation offers a better balance between revenue and consumer preference. The Pyomo code is available upon request.

Independent representations of ipsilateral and contralateral limbs in primary motor cortex.

Several lines of research demonstrate that primary motor cortex (M1) is principally involved in controlling the contralateral side of the body. However, M1 activity has been correlated with both contralateral and ipsilateral limb movements. Why does ipsilaterally-related activity not cause contralateral motor output? To address this question, we trained monkeys to counter mechanical loads applied to their right and left limbs. We found >50% of M1 neurons had load-related activity for both limbs. Contralateral loads evoked changes in activity ~10ms sooner than ipsilateral loads. We also found corresponding population activities were distinct, with contralateral activity residing in a subspace that was orthogonal to the ipsilateral activity. Thus, neural responses for the contralateral limb can be extracted without interference from the activity for the ipsilateral limb, and vice versa. Our results show that M1 activity unrelated to downstream motor targets can be segregated from activity related to the downstream motor output.

(Invited) A Critical View on the Application of Distribution of Relaxation Times

Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) has been an important tool in Solid State Ionics since the sixties of the 20th century. Evolving from graphical analysis to fully automated Complex Nonlinear Least Squares analysis (CNLS), it has contributed to a better understanding of charge and mass transfer and storage processes in solid state devices, e.g. batteries, sensors, fuel cells etc. In many cases the use of an Equivalent Circuit (EqC) gave access to important materials parameters. Due to the increasing complexity of e.g. electrodes, it is not always simple to find an appropriate EqC. The transformation of the impedance spectra to a distribution of relaxation times in the τ-domain has gained increased attention over the last decades, as it is seen as a model independent representation. The main problem, however, is that this transformation is an ill-posed inverse problem. Various methods (e.g. FFT, Tikhonov Regularization, Max Entropy) have been designed to provide the distributions, but they all require adjustment of a ‘smoothing’ parameter. In this presentation the advantages and limitations of the use of a DRT will be presented with selected practical examples.

Spatial Cues Influence Time Estimations in Deaf Individuals.

SummaryRecent studies have reported a strong interaction between spatial and temporal representation when visual experience is missing: blind people use temporal representation of events to represent spatial metrics. Given the superiority of audition on time perception, we hypothesized that when audition is not available complex temporal representations could be impaired, and spatial representation of events could be used to build temporal metrics. To test this hypothesis, deaf and hearing subjects were tested with a visual temporal task where conflicting and not conflicting spatiotemporal information was delivered. As predicted, we observed a strong deficit of deaf participants when only temporal cues were useful and space was uninformative with respect to time. However, the deficit disappeared when coherent spatiotemporal cues were presented and increased for conflicting spatiotemporal stimuli. These results highlight that spatial cues influence time estimations in deaf participants, suggesting that deaf individuals use spatial information to infer temporal environmental coordinates.

Syntactic representation is independent of semantics in Mandarin: evidence from syntactic priming

ABSTRACTTheories of language processing generally assume that speakers construct independent representations for syntactic and semantic information, based largely on evidence from English and related languages. But it is not clear whether the assumption of autonomous syntactic representations extends to other languages with different typological characteristics. We therefore conducted two structural priming studies investigating production of dative sentences in Mandarin, a language whose interpretation appears to be more reliant on non-relational (intrinsic) semantics (e.g. animacy features). We examined whether participants’ tendency to repeat syntax was affected by whether the theme and recipient arguments matched or mismatched in animacy across prime and target. Participants repeated syntax to the same extent irrespective of whether prime and target arguments had matched or mismatched animacy. These findings provide evidence that the separation of syntactic and semantic representations occurs in Mandarin and therefore may occur across languages.

Numbers on maps as a new cartographic technique: helpful or harmful for users? An empirical study

Abstract. The huge popularity of the map as a medium of information transfer means that the number of map makers and map users is constantly increasing. In an era of GIS technology, open-source software, and wide access to spatial data, map making may seem simple, and the skills required available to almost everyone; however, the simplicity is only apparent. In fact, the creation of an efficient and effective map is extremely difficult, labour-intensive, and requires a good knowledge of the principles of cartographic representations.Map creation requires the use of various graphic solutions, and various cartographic representation techniques can be used. The most commonly used ‘graphic alphabet’ is by Jacques Bertin, i.e., visual variables. For the presentation of quantitative data expressed by numerical values, it is most appropriate to use visual variables of a size or value that correctly reflect the differences in the statistical data. These variables most often form the basis for the cartographic presentation of quantitative data.An effective, efficient, and proper map, according to J. Bertin (1983), is one that generalizes information and displays it using appropriately selected graphic symbols. Sometimes more variables are used to improve and highlight the information presented on the map, i.e., when size and value are used simultaneously – it is called redundancy (Slocum et all 2010, Morrison, Watson, Morrison 2015).Currently, there is a tendency to show a lot of information on maps, using the maximum amount of precision and detail. This often produces the opposite result: the map becomes illegible, does not explain phenomena, and misleads the user. These facts prompted us to look at a new cartographic solution which increasingly appears on maps: numbers used for presenting quantitative information (Brewer 1998).This paper presents empirical research on the numbers (Fig. 1a), graduated numbers (Fig. 1b), and proportional symbols (Fig. 1c) used in cartographic representation techniques for quantitative data. The research was conducted in Poland in 2019. There were over 600 participants, high school students from general and technical schools. They were asked to analyse maps and solve different types of tasks. The time and correctness of response were examined to look for differences between the cartographic representations.The research asked whether numbers or graduated numbers used on maps could be treated as an independent cartographic representation technique, or if they should be used only as a complement to other representation techniques. It was very interesting to learn which cartographic representation technique is more useful and effective: numbers, graduated numbers, or proportional symbols (squares). The research verified whether numbers and graduated numbers work better when reading a map at a detailed level (e.g. comparing values in two or three neighbouring units), than when reading the map at a general level. Numbers and graduated numbers seem to be very close to proportional symbols. It was also interesting to learn if these were legible enough to interpret the map properly, and therefore if they are helpful or harmful for map users.