Laurent Itti of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering and Pierre Baldi of the University of California Irvine's Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, will present their results December 7, at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference in Vancouver, B.C.
Itti and Baldi went back to first principles in developing their theory, taking off from fundamental work by Claude Shannon creating (in the title of his classic 1948 paper) "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." The pair's mathematical theory of surprise proposes an alternative mode for characterizing and quantifying information, distinct from Shannon's model -- a subjective one.
Shannon's technique is not about a specific observer, but any observer seeking to pick out a message from its noisy environment, or send one with an assurance it will be read accurately, according to Itti, a research assistant professor in the Viterbi School's department of computer science.
But the same noisy environmental buzz of activity that communicators must package their messages to survive in itself contains information crucial to individuals -- information that is not in message form. These include potential threats or opportunities. Individuals clearly develop mechanisms by which they devote attention to certain stimuli, while ignoring others, in the flood of information that they receive from their senses.
As Itti and Baldi write, "efficient and rapid attentional allocation is key to predation, escape, and mating -- in short, to survival."
According to the researchers, previous computational work on the problem has been phrased in the vocabulary of the str
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Contact: Eric Mankin
mankin@usc.edu
213-821-1887
University of Southern California
28-Nov-2005