scholarly journals When Computational Representation Meets Neuroscience: A Survey on Brain Encoding and Decoding

Author(s):  
Lu Cao ◽  
Dandan Huang ◽  
Yue Zhang

Real human language mechanisms and the artificial intelligent language processing methods are two independent systems. Exploring the relationship between the two can help develop human-like language models and is also beneficial to reveal the neuroscience of the reading brain. The flourishing research in this interdisciplinal research field calls for surveys to systemically study and analyze the recent successes. However, such a comprehensive review still cannot be found, which motivates our work. This article first briefly introduces the interdisciplinal research progress, then systematically discusses the task of brain decoding from the perspective of simple concepts and complete sentences, and also describes main limitations in this field and put forward with possible solutions. Finally, we conclude this survey with certain open research questions that will stimulate further studies.

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Changchang Zeng ◽  
Shaobo Li

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a challenging natural language processing (NLP) task. It has a wide application potential in the fields of question answering robots, human-computer interactions in mobile virtual reality systems, etc. Recently, the emergence of pretrained models (PTMs) has brought this research field into a new era, in which the training objective plays a key role. The masked language model (MLM) is a self-supervised training objective widely used in various PTMs. With the development of training objectives, many variants of MLM have been proposed, such as whole word masking, entity masking, phrase masking, and span masking. In different MLMs, the length of the masked tokens is different. Similarly, in different machine reading comprehension tasks, the length of the answer is also different, and the answer is often a word, phrase, or sentence. Thus, in MRC tasks with different answer lengths, whether the length of MLM is related to performance is a question worth studying. If this hypothesis is true, it can guide us on how to pretrain the MLM with a relatively suitable mask length distribution for MRC tasks. In this paper, we try to uncover how much of MLM’s success in the machine reading comprehension tasks comes from the correlation between masking length distribution and answer length in the MRC dataset. In order to address this issue, herein, (1) we propose four MRC tasks with different answer length distributions, namely, the short span extraction task, long span extraction task, short multiple-choice cloze task, and long multiple-choice cloze task; (2) four Chinese MRC datasets are created for these tasks; (3) we also have pretrained four masked language models according to the answer length distributions of these datasets; and (4) ablation experiments are conducted on the datasets to verify our hypothesis. The experimental results demonstrate that our hypothesis is true. On four different machine reading comprehension datasets, the performance of the model with correlation length distribution surpasses the model without correlation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Magnus Hvattum

AbstractThe increasing availability of data from sports events has led to many new directions of research, and sports analytics can play a role in making better decisions both within a club and at the level of an individual player. The ability to objectively evaluate individual players in team sports is one aspect that may enable better decision making, but such evaluations are not straightforward to obtain. One class of ratings for individual players in team sports, known as plus-minus ratings, attempt to distribute credit for the performance of a team onto the players of that team. Such ratings have a long history, going back at least to the 1950s, but in recent years research on advanced versions of plus-minus ratings has increased noticeably. This paper presents a comprehensive review of contributions to plus-minus ratings in later years, pointing out some key developments and showing the richness of the mathematical models developed. One conclusion is that the literature on plus-minus ratings is quite fragmented, but that awareness of past contributions to the field should allow researchers to focus on some of the many open research questions related to the evaluation of individual players in team sports.


Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 364
Author(s):  
Michaela R. Reagan ◽  
Heather Fairfield ◽  
Clifford J. Rosen

Cancers that grow in the bone marrow are for most patients scary, painful, and incurable. These cancers are especially hard to treat due to the supportive microenvironment provided by the bone marrow niche in which they reside. New therapies designed to target tumor cells have extended the life expectancy for these patients, but better therapies are needed and new ideas for how to target these cancers are crucial. This need has led researchers to interrogate whether bone marrow adipocytes (BMAds), which increase in number and size during aging and in obesity, contribute to cancer initiation or progression within the bone marrow. Across the globe, the consensus in the field is a unified “yes”. However, how to target these adipocytes or the factors they produce and how BMAds interact with different tumor cells are open research questions. Herein, we review this research field, with the goal of accelerating research in the network of laboratories working in this area and attracting bright scientists with new perspectives and ideas to the field in order to bring about better therapies for patients with bone cancers.


Author(s):  
Viivi H. A. Hirvonen ◽  
James Spencer ◽  
Marc W. van der Kamp

OXA-48-type β-lactamases are now routinely encountered in bacterial infections caused by carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales. These enzymes are of high and growing clinical significance due to the importance of carbapenems in treatment of healthcare-associated infections by Gram-negative bacteria, the wide and increasing dissemination of OXA-48 enzymes on plasmids, and the challenges posed by their detection. OXA-48 confers resistance to penicillin (which is efficiently hydrolyzed) and carbapenem antibiotics (more slowly broken down). In addition to the parent enzyme, a growing array of variants of OXA-48 is now emerging. The spectrum of activity of these variants varies, with some hydrolyzing expanded-spectrum oxyimino-cephalosporins. The growth in importance and diversity of the OXA-48 group has motivated increasing numbers of studies that aim to elucidate the relationship between structure and specificity and establish the mechanistic basis for β-lactam turnover in this enzyme family. In this review we collate recently published structural, kinetic, and mechanistic information on the interactions between clinically relevant β-lactam antibiotics and inhibitors with OXA-48 β-lactamases. Collectively, these studies are starting to form a detailed picture of the underlying bases for the differences in β-lactam specificity between OXA-48 variants, and the consequent differences in resistance phenotype. We focus specifically on aspects of carbapenemase and cephalosporinase activities of OXA-48 β-lactamases and discuss β-lactamase inhibitor development in this context. Throughout the review, we also outline key open research questions for future investigation.


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 157-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip L. Roth ◽  
Allen I. Huffcutt

The topic of what interviews measure has received a great deal of attention over the years. One line of research has investigated the relationship between interviews and the construct of cognitive ability. A previous meta-analysis reported an overall corrected correlation of .40 ( Huffcutt, Roth, & McDaniel, 1996 ). A more recent meta-analysis reported a noticeably lower corrected correlation of .27 ( Berry, Sackett, & Landers, 2007 ). After reviewing both meta-analyses, it appears that the two studies posed different research questions. Further, there were a number of coding judgments in Berry et al. that merit review, and there was no moderator analysis for educational versus employment interviews. As a result, we reanalyzed the work by Berry et al. and found a corrected correlation of .42 for employment interviews (.15 higher than Berry et al., a 56% increase). Further, educational interviews were associated with a corrected correlation of .21, supporting their influence as a moderator. We suggest a better estimate of the correlation between employment interviews and cognitive ability is .42, and this takes us “back to the future” in that the better overall estimate of the employment interviews – cognitive ability relationship is roughly .40. This difference has implications for what is being measured by interviews and their incremental validity.


Author(s):  
Jeetendra P. Sah ◽  
Aaron W. Abrams ◽  
Geetha Chari ◽  
Craig Linden ◽  
Yaacov Anziska

AbstractIn this article, we reported a case of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) type I noted to have tetraventricular hydrocephalus with Blake's pouch cyst at 8 months of age following intrathecal nusinersen therapy. The association of hydrocephalus with SMA is rarely reported in the literature. Development of hydrocephalus after intrathecal nusinersen therapy is also reported in some cases, but a cause–effect relationship is not yet established. The aim of this study was to describe the clinical characteristics of a patient with SMA type I and hydrocephalus, to review similar cases reported in the literature, and to explore the relationship between nusinersen therapy and development of hydrocephalus. The clinical presentation and radiographic findings of the patient are described and a comprehensive review of the literature was conducted. The adverse effect of communicating hydrocephalus related to nusinersen therapy is being reported and the authors suggest carefully monitoring for features of hydrocephalus developing during the course of nusinersen therapy.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (Number 2) ◽  
pp. 67-77
Author(s):  
Anis Syamimi Abd Rahim ◽  
Mohd Norhasni Mohd Asaad

The purpose of this study is to review the implementation of ISO 9001:2015 in order to improve the quality of services at Pusat Kesihatan Universiti (PKU), Universiti Utara Malaysia. The respondents of this study were customers at the PKU, UUM. The questionnaire was distributed to 50 respondents. The data were analyzed using SPSS software version 24. The data were tested using descriptive statistics, and correlation analysis to answer the research questions and to achieve the objectives. The findings show that customers agree that implementation of ISO 9001:2015 give service at PKU, UUM is good and satisfied. Through the correlation test, the results showed that the relationship between the implementation of ISO 9001:2015 has a positive and significant impact on customer satisfaction and the effect of implementing ISO 9001:2015 has a positive and significant impact in improving quality of service at PKU, UUM.Through mean and standard deviation tests, results show that tangible dimensions are the main dimensions of customer satisfaction while dimensions with low values are dimensions of responsiveness.Therefore, all aspects of service in PKU, UUM will be strengthened and all aspects of the weaknesses could be addressed to improve the service in order to maintain good quality services.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Noorlaila Yunus ◽  
Cairul Azwa Azimi

Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) has been widely studied across the boarders especially in the western countries. This workplace voluntary behaviour is associated with many predictors that may bring whether major, minor or negative influence towards the engagement of employees’ OCB. Basically, this study is focusing on motivation as the predictor or independent variable that influence employees’ engagement on the OCB (altruism, conscientiousness, courtesy, civic virtue and sportsmanship) behaviour. Herzberg’s motivator factor (achievement, advancement, recognition and growth) has been chosen as the independent variable. A total of 150 questionnaires were distributed conveniently to respondents. With 125 questionnaires returned, researcher was able to analyze the data based on the research questions and hypotheses developed. The findings showed moderate and weak, significant relationship between the variable excluding the relationship between independent variable and civic virtue and sportsmanship. Thus, Herzberg’s motivator factor was not a predictor to civic virtue and sportsmanship behaviour. However for the strongest predictor; achievement, growth and growth are strongly predicts the altruism, conscientiousness and courtesy behaviour respectively. However, with the absence of relationship between independent variable and civic virtue as well as sportsmanship, therefore the strongest predictor cannot be determined as the value recorded was below the criterion.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Goodwin ◽  
Yaacov Petscher ◽  
Jamie Tock

Various models have highlighted the complexity of language. Building on foundational ideas regarding three key aspects of language, our study contributes to the literature by 1) exploring broader conceptions of morphology, vocabulary, and syntax, 2) operationalizing this theoretical model into a gamified, standardized, computer-adaptive assessment of language for fifth to eighth grade students entitled Monster, PI, and 3) uncovering further evidence regarding the relationship between language and standardized reading comprehension via this assessment. Multiple-group item response theory (IRT) across grades show that morphology was best fit by a bifactor model of task specific factors along with a global factor related to each skill. Vocabulary was best fit by a bifactor model that identifies performance overall and on specific words. Syntax, though, was best fit by a unidimensional model. Next, Monster, PI produced reliable scores suggesting language can be assessed efficiently and precisely for students via this model. Lastly, performance on Monster, PI explained more than 50% of variance in standardized reading, suggesting operationalizing language via Monster, PI can provide meaningful understandings of the relationship between language and reading comprehension. Specifically, considering just a subset of a construct, like identification of units of meaning, explained significantly less variance in reading comprehension. This highlights the importance of considering these broader constructs. Implications indicate that future work should consider a model of language where component areas are considered broadly and contributions to reading comprehension are explored via general performance on components as well as skill level performance.


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