© The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract In the study of neurosciences, and of complex biological systems in general, there is frequently a need to fit mathematical models with large numbers of parameters to highly complex datasets. Here we consider algorithms of two different classes, gradient following (GF) methods and evolutionary algorithms (EA) and examine their performance in fitting a 9-parameter model of a filter-based visual neuron to real data recorded from a sample of 107 neurons in macaque primary visual cortex (V1). Although the GF method converged very rapidly on a solution, it was highly susceptible to the effects of local minima in the error surface and produced relatively poor fits unless the initial estimates of the parameters were already very good. Conversely, although the EA required many more iterations of evaluating the model neuron’s response to a series of stimuli, it ultimately found better solutions in nearly all cases and its performance was independent of the starting parameters of the model. Thus, although the fitting process was lengthy in terms of processing time, the relative lack of human intervention in the evolutionary algorithm, and its ability ultimately to generate model fits that could be trusted as being close to optimal, made it far superior in this particular application than the gradient following methods. This is likely to be the case in many further complex systems, as are often found in neuroscience.

®, the current paper develops an automated procedure by utilizing several SAS ® software and procedures (i.e. PROC IML, PROC SQL, SAS/GRAPH®, GTL, & ODS) for the construction of the CFT forms. The purpose is to demonstrate an automated and efficient way to obtain test and item information functions

The fluorometric analysis of phenylalanine described by McCaman and Robins has been adapted to automation. The procedure may be used on 20-,J. whole-blood samples which may be stored on filter paper for elution. The procedure is rapid, reproducible, and accurate, making it useful for screening

Abstract Deductive program synthesis systems based on automated theorem proving ooeer the promise of software that is correct by construction. However, the diOEculty encountered in constructing usable deductive synthesis systems has prevented their widespread use. Amphion is a real-world, domain

A Flexible automated procedure for modeling complex arrival processes

subcomponents to deal with auditory/verbal material and visual/2- or 3-dimensional information as well as an effectively unlimited long-term memory, holding schemas that vary in their degree of automation. These structures and functions of human cognitive architecture have been used to design a variety of novel

Cluster analysis is the automated search for groups of related observations in a data set. Most clustering done in practice is based largely on heuristic but intuitively reasonable procedures and most clustering methods available in commercial software are also of this type. However

properties in humans, it is necessary to obtain an accurate and explicit representation of the cortical surface in individual subjects. Here we describe a set of automated procedures for obtaining accurate reconstructions of the cortical surface, which have been applied to data from more than 100 subjects

many software packages and the repeated use of interactive threedimensional graphics. PHENIX has been developed to provide a comprehensive system for macromolecular crystallographic structure solution with an emphasis on the automation of all procedures. This has relied on the development of algorithms

Abstract. Comics has been studied for a long time, as they are the oldest genre of non-photorealistic rendering. Especially, it is a very interesting work to transform a video into a comics in an automatic manner. As a kind of sub-work for this, we introduce a method to automatically place word balloons in an image in this paper. It is not trivial to place the time-serial word balloons with keeping the rules of 2D comics text layout. Our algorithm first positions each word balloon relative to its respective actor while maintaining the reading order of dialogues by applying a cartographical labeling algorithm. The position of each balloon is then refined on the basis of our proposed measure that estimates the quality of balloon layout. We experiment with several commercial cinemas, which shows that the final results are good enough to compare with hand-drawn comics. 1