A network of pyramidal neurons is sensitive to the timing of its excitatory inputs

The transmission of excitatory inputs by a network of coupled pyramidal cells is investigated by means of numerical simulations. The pyramidal cell models are coupled by excitatory synapses and each one receives an excitatory pulse at a random time extracted from a Gaussian distribution. Moreover, each cell model is injected with a noisy current. It was found that the excitatory coupling promotes the transmission of the synaptic inputs on a time scale of a few ms.     

Preface of special issue of CCSN2016

Microsystem Technologies -     

A data constrained approach for brain tumour detection using fused deep features and SVM

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The identification of MR images of the brain with tumours is one of the most critical tasks of any brain tumour (BT) detection system. Interestingly, because of...     

Pigeons (Columba livia) associate time intervals with symbols in a touch screen task: Evidence for ordinality but not summation.

The present experiments examined whether pigeons can sum symbols that are associated with various temporal consequences in a touch screen apparatus. Pigeons were trained to discriminate between two visual symbols that were associated with 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 s either of delay to 4 s of hopper access (delay group) or duration of hopper access (reward group). In Experiment 1, the pigeons in both groups learned to select the symbol associated with the more favorable outcome, and they successfully transferred this discrimination to novel symbol pairs. However, when tested with 2 pairs of symbols associated with different summed durations, they responded on the basis of a simple response rule rather than the sum of the symbol pair. In Experiment 2, the reward group was presented with four symbols at once and was allowed to successively choose one symbol at a time. All pigeons chose the symbols in order from largest to smallest. This indicates that pigeons formed an ordered representation of symbols associated with different time intervals, even though they did not sum the symbols. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Numerical integration based on quasi-interpolating splines

In this paper product quadrature rules based on quasi-interpolating splines are proposed and convergence results are proved for bounded integrands. Convergence results are also proved for sequences of Cauchy principal value integrals of these quasiinterpolating splines. Some comparisons with other methods and numerical examples are given.     

Efficient peerGroup management in JXTA-Overlay P2P system for developing groupware tools

With the fast development of IT technologies, virtual organizations are more and more present in the current collaborative work and learning activity. For instance, many subjects in virtual distance learning are organized as online groups of students, who use groupware tools to complete their learning tasks. In this paper, we address the efficient management of peer groups in JXTA-based P2P systems as a key issue in many P2P applications that use peer group as a unit such as for remote execution of tasks in parallel and distributed applications. From this perspective, we consider peer grouping as the basis in the development of groupware tools in P2P systems.     

Providing effective feedback, monitoring and evaluation to on-line collaborative learning discussions

Learning and knowledge building have become critical competences for people in the knowledge society era. In this paper, we propose a sociolinguistic dialogue model for understanding how learning evolves and how cognitive process is constructed in on-line discussions. The knowledge extracted from this model is used to assess participation behavior, knowledge building and performance. The ultimate purpose is to provide effective feedback, evaluation and monitoring to the discussion process. Seven hundred students from the Open University of Catalonia in Spain participated in this study. Results showed that learning and knowledge building may be greatly enhanced by presenting selected knowledge to learners as for their particular skills exhibited during interaction. In addition, this valuable provision of information is used as a meta cognitive tool for tutors and moderators for monitoring and evaluating the discussion process more conveniently. This contribution presents our conceptual model for interaction management as well as key design guidelines and evaluation results. Implications of this study are remarked and further research directions are proposed.