Genetic programming, a form of genetic algorithm that evolves programs and program-like executable structures, is a new paradigm for developing reliable, time- and cost-effective applications. The second volume of Advances in Genetic Programming highlights many of the most recent technical advances in this increasingly popular field.
Genetic programming, a form of genetic algorithm that evolves programs and program-like executable structures, is a new paradigm for developing reliable, time- and cost-effective applications. The second volume of Advances in Genetic Programming highlights many of the most recent technical advances in this increasingly popular field. The twenty-three contributions are divided into four parts: Variations on the Genetic Programming Theme; Hierarchical, Recursive, and Pruning Genetic Programs; Analysis and Implementation Issues; and New Environments for Genetic Programming. The first part extends the core concepts of genetic programming through the addition of new evolutionary techniques―adaptive and self-adaptive crossover methods, hill climbing operators, and the inclusion of introns into the representation. Creating more concise executable structures is a long-term research topic in genetic programming. The second part describes the field's most recent efforts, including the dynamic manipulation of automatically defined functions, evolving logic programs that generate recursive structures, and using minimum description length heuristics to determine when and how to prune evolving structures. The third part takes up the many implementation and analysis issues associated with evolving programs. Advanced applications of genetic programming to nontrivial real-world problems are described in the final part: remote sensing of pressure ridges in Arctic sea ice formations from satellite imagery, economic prediction through model evolution, the evolutionary development of stress and loading models for novel materials, and data mining of a large customer database to optimize responses to special offers.

Advances in Genetic Programming, Vol. 2 (Complex Adaptive Systems)

Computers & Technology

Computer Science

Bradford Book

In Neural Organization, Arbib, Érdi, and Szentágothai integrate structural, functional, and dynamical approaches to the interaction of brain models and neurobiologcal experiments. Both structure-based "bottom-up" and function- based "top-down" models offer coherent concepts by which to evaluate the experimental data. The goal of this book is to point out the advantages of a multidisciplinary, multistrategied approach to the brain.Part I of Neural Organization provides a detailed introduction to each of the three areas of structure, function, and dynamics. Structure refers to the anatomical aspects of the brain and the relations between different brain regions. Function refers to skills and behaviors, which are explained by means of functional schemas and biologically based neural networks. Dynamics refers to the use of a mathematical framework to analyze the temporal change of neural activities and synaptic connectivities that underlie brain development and plasticity--in terms of both detailed single-cell models and large-scale network models.In part II, the authors show how their systematic approach can be used to analyze specific parts of the nervous system--the olfactory system, hippocampus, thalamus, cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and basal ganglia--as well as to integrate data from the study of brain regions, functional models, and the dynamics of neural networks. In conclusion, they offer a plan for the use of their methods in the development of cognitive neuroscience.

Neural Organization: Structure, Function, and Dynamics

Medical Books

Arbib, Michael A.

Peter Erdi

John Szentagothai

Medicine

An overview of neurotechnology, the engineering of robots based on animals and animal behavior.
The goal of neurotechnology is to confer the performance advantages of animal systems on robotic machines. Biomimetic robots differ from traditional robots in that they are agile, relatively cheap, and able to deal with real-world environments. The engineering of these robots requires a thorough understanding of the biological systems on which they are based, at both the biomechanical and physiological levels.This book provides an in-depth overview of the field. The areas covered include myomorphic actuators, which mimic muscle action; neuromorphic sensors, which, like animal sensors, represent sensory modalities such as light, pressure, and motion in a labeled-line code; biomimetic controllers, based on the relatively simple control systems of invertebrate animals; and the autonomous behaviors that are based on an animal's selection of behaviors from a species-specific behavioral "library." The ultimate goal is to develop a truly autonomous robot, one able to navigate and interact with its environment solely on the basis of sensory feedback without prompting from a human operator.

Neurotechnology for Biomimetic Robots (Bradford Books)

A new, dramatically updated edition of the classic resource on the constantly evolving fields of brain theory and neural networks.Dramatically updating and extending the first edition, published in 1995, the second edition of The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks presents the enormous progress made in recent years in the many subfields related to the two great questions: How does the brain work? and, How can we build intelligent machines?
Once again, the heart of the book is a set of almost 300 articles covering the whole spectrum of topics in brain theory and neural networks. The first two parts of the book, prepared by Michael Arbib, are designed to help readers orient themselves in this wealth of material. Part I provides general background on brain modeling and on both biological and artificial neural networks. Part II consists of "Road Maps" to help readers steer through articles in part III on specific topics of interest. The articles in part III are written so as to be accessible to readers of diverse backgrounds. They are cross-referenced and provide lists of pointers to Road Maps, background material, and related reading.
The second edition greatly increases the coverage of models of fundamental neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience, and neural network approaches to language. It contains 287 articles, compared to the 266 in the first edition. Articles on topics from the first edition have been updated by the original authors or written anew by new authors, and there are 106 articles on new topics.

The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks: Second Edition

Certification

A proposal that the basic mental models used to structure social interaction result from self-organization in brain activity.In The Self-Organizing Social Mind, John Bolender proposes a new explanation for the forms of social relations. He argues that the core of social-relational cognition exhibits beauty―in the physicist's sense of the word, associated with symmetry. Bolender describes a fundamental set of patterns in interpersonal cognition, which account for the resulting structures of social life in terms of their symmetries and the breaking of those symmetries. He further describes the symmetries of the four fundamental social relations as ordered in a nested series akin to what one finds in the formation of a snowflake or spiral galaxy. Symmetry breaking organizes the neural activity generating the cognitive models that structure our social relationships.Bolender's primary claim is that there exists a social pattern generator analogous to the central pattern generators associated with locomotion in many animal species. Spontaneous symmetry breaking structures the activity of the social pattern generator just as it does in central pattern generators.Bolender's hypothesis that relational cognition results from self-organization is entirely novel, distinct from other theories that describe sociality in terms of evolution or environment. It presents a picture of social-relational cognition as resembling something inorganic. In doing so it reveals deep connections among cognition, biology, and the inorganic world. One can go too far, he acknowledges, in taking a solely dynamical view of the mind; the mind's innate functional complexity must be due to natural selection. But this does not mean that every simple mental feature is the result of natural selection. By noting a descending symmetry subgroup chain at the core of relational cognition, Bolender takes the first step in an important investigation.

The Self-Organizing Social Mind (Bradford Book)

Politics & Social Sciences

Bolender, John

Philosophy

Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (Mit Press)

A comprehensive presentation of an approach that proposes a new account of cognition at levels from the cellular to the social.
This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Enaction, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991), breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. Enaction offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science.
Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science.
Contributors Renaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Véronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Núñez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson

Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (Bradford Books)

An argument that achieving millennial life spans or monumental intellects will destroy values that give meaning to human lives.
Proposals to make us smarter than the greatest geniuses or to add thousands of years to our life spans seem fit only for the spam folder or trash can. And yet this is what contemporary advocates of radical enhancement offer in all seriousness. They present a variety of technologies and therapies that will expand our capacities far beyond what is currently possible for human beings. In Humanity's End, Nicholas Agar argues against radical enhancement, describing its destructive consequences. 
Agar examines the proposals of four prominent radical enhancers: Ray Kurzweil, who argues that technology will enable our escape from human biology; Aubrey de Grey, who calls for anti-aging therapies that will achieve "longevity escape velocity"; Nick Bostrom, who defends the morality and rationality of enhancement; and James Hughes, who envisions a harmonious democracy of the enhanced and the unenhanced. Agar argues that the outcomes of radical enhancement could be darker than the rosy futures described by these thinkers. The most dramatic means of enhancing our cognitive powers could in fact kill us; the radical extension of our life span could eliminate experiences of great value from our lives; and a situation in which some humans are radically enhanced and others are not could lead to tyranny of posthumans over humans.

Humanity's End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology (Hardcover))

Agar, Professor Nicholas

How people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend reference, and how children acquire an understanding of and an ability to use reference.
This volume brings together contributions by prominent researchers in the fields of language processing and language acquisition on topics of common interest: how people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend such referential expressions, and how children acquire the ability to refer and to understand reference. The contributors first discuss issues related to children's acquisition and processing of reference, then consider evidence of adults' processing of reference from eye-tracking methods (the visual-world paradigm) and from corpora and reading experiments. They go on to discuss such topics as how children resolve ambiguity, children's difficulty in understanding coreference, the use of eye movements to physical objects to measure the accessibility of different referents, the uses of probabilistic and pragmatic information in language comprehension, antecedent accessibility and salience in reference, and neuropsychological data from the event-related potential (ERP) recording literature.

The Processing and Acquisition of Reference (Mit Press)

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

An account of scientific laws that vindicates the status of psychological laws and shows natural laws to be compatible with free will.
In Laws, Mind, and Free Will, Steven Horst addresses the apparent dissonance between the picture of the natural world that arises from the sciences and our understanding of ourselves as agents who think and act. If the mind and the world are entirely governed by natural laws, there seems to be no room left for free will to operate. Moreover, although the laws of physical science are clear and verifiable, the sciences of the mind seem to yield only rough generalizations rather than universal laws of nature. Horst argues that these two familiar problems in philosophy―the apparent tension between free will and natural law and the absence of "strict" laws in the sciences of the mind―are artifacts of a particular philosophical thesis about the nature of laws: that laws make claims about how objects actually behave.
Horst argues against this Empiricist orthodoxy and proposes an alternative account of laws―an account rooted in a cognitivist approach to philosophy of science. Horst argues that once we abandon the Empiricist misunderstandings of the nature of laws there is no contrast between "strict" laws and generalizations about the mind ("ceteris paribus" laws, laws hedged by the caveat "other things being equal"), and that a commitment to laws is compatible with a commitment to the existence of free will. Horst's alternative account, which he calls "cognitive Pluralism," vindicates the truth of psychological laws and resolves the tension between human freedom and the sciences.

Laws, Mind, and Free Will (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology (Hardcover))

Horst, Department of Philosophy Steven

A do-it-yourself manual for culturing nerve cells, complete with recipes and protocols.Because neurons and glia in culture are remarkably similar to those in situ, culture systems make it possible to identify significant cell interactions and to elucidate their mechanisms. This book is in many ways a do-it-yourself manual for culturing nerve cells, complete with recipes and protocols. But it also provides an understanding of the principles behind the protocols. In effect the contributors invite you into their labs and provide much of the information you would obtain from such a visit.The authors of the introductory chapters present the nuts-and-bolts principles of growing nerve cells. The authors of the following chapters discuss the culturing of specific cell types. They explain how their experimental goals have shaped their particular cell culture approach and the advantages and disadvantages of the cell culture systems they have developed. They provide detailed protocols and describe their cultures in practical terms, from when the cells are first plated through the various phases of their development.
Contributors Janet Alder, Hannelore Asmussen, Gerard Bain, Gary Banker, Robert W. Baughman, Richard P. Bunge, Ann Marie Craig, Matthew E. Cunningham, Dominique Debanne, Stephen E. Farinelli, Michael F.A. Finley, Gerald D. Fishbach, Beat H. Gähwiler, W.-Q. Gao, Daniel J. Goldberg, Kimberly Goslin, David I. Gottlieb, Lloyd A. Greene, Mary Beth Hatten, Dennis Higgins, James E. Huettner, Kenneth A. Jones, Naomi Kleitman, Raul Krauss, Ronald M. Lindsay, Nagesh K. Mahanthappa, Carol A. Mason, Margot Mayer-Pröschel, R. Anne McKinney, Mary E. Morrison, Mark Noble, David S. Park, Paul H. Patterson, Mu-ming Poo, Richard T. Robertson, Samuel Schacher, Michael M. Segal, Carolyn L. Smith, Nacira Tabti, Scott M. Thompson, Roseann Ventimiglia, Ginger S. Withers, Patrick M. Wood, Min Yao

Culturing Nerve Cells, Second Edition (Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience)

Anthropology

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