“An Algorithmic View of the Universe”

On June 23 last year ACM organized a special event to celebrate the birth centenary of Alan Turing with 33 Turing award winners in attendance. Needless to say most of the presentations, lectures and discussions were quite fantastic. They had been placed as webcasts on this website, however rather unfortunately, they were not individually linkable and it was difficult to share them. I noticed day before yesterday that they were finally available on youtube!

One particular video that I had liked a lot was “An Algorithmic View of the Universe”, featuring some great discussions between a panel comprising of Robert Tarjan, Richard Karp, Don Knuth, Leslie Valiant and Leonard Adleman, with the panel chaired by Christos Papadimitriou. You might want to consider watching it if you have about 80 minutes to spare and provided you haven’t watched it earlier!

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Ray Solomonoff is No More

For the past couple of years, I have had a couple of questions about machine learning research that I have wanted to ask some experts, but never got the chance to do so. I did not even know if my questions made sense at all. I would probably write about them on a blog post soon enough.

It is however ironical that I came to know my questions were valid and well discussed (I never knew what to search for them, I used expressions not used by researchers) only by the death of Ray Solomonoff (he was one researcher who worked on it, and an obituary on him highlighted his work on it, something I missed). Solomonoff was one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence as a field and Machine Learning as a discipline within it. It must be noted that he was one of the few attendees at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, basically an extended brain storming session that started AI formally as a field. The other attendees were : Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, Arthur Samuel,  Oliver Selfridge, Claude Shannon, Nathaniel Rochester and Trenchand Moore. His 1950-52 papers on networks are regarded as the first statistical analysis of the same.  Solomonoff was thus a towering figure in AI and Machine Learning.

[Ray Solomonoff  : (25 July 1926- 7 December 2009)]

Solomonoff is widely considered as the father of Machine Learning for circulating the first report on the same in 1956. His particular focus was on the use of probability and its relation to learning. He founded the idea of Algorithmic Probability (ALP)  in a 1960 paper at Caltech, an idea that gives rise to Kolmogorov Complexity as a side product. A. N. Kolmogorov independently discovered similar results and came to know of and acknowledged Solomonoff’s earlier work on Algorithmic Information Theory. His work however was relatively unknown in the west than in the soviet union, which is why Algorithmic Information Theory is mostly referred to as Kolmogorov complexity rather than “Solomonoff Complexity”. Kolmogorov and Solomonoff approached the same framework from different directions. While Kolmogorov was concerned with randomness and Information Theory, Solomonoff was concerned with inductive reasoning. And in doing so he discovered ALP and Kolomogorov Complexity years before anyone did. I would write below on only one aspect of his work that I have studied to some degree in the past year.

Solomonoff With G.J Chaitin, another pioneer in Algorithmic Information Theory

[Image Source]

The Universal Distribution:

His 1956 paper, “An inductive inference machine” was one of the seminal papers that used probability in Machine Learning. He outlined two main problems which he thought (correctly) were linked.

The Problem of Learning in Humans : How do you use all the information that you gather in life in making decisions?

The Problem of Probability : Given you have some data and some a-priori information, how can you make the best possible predictions for the future?

The problem of learning is more general and related to the problem of probability. Solomonoff noted that the Machine learning was simply the process of approximating ideal probabilistic predictions for practical use.

Building on his 1956 paper, he discovered probabilistic languages for induction at a time when it was considered out of fashion. And discovered the Universal Distribution.

All induction problems could be basically reduced to this form : Given a sequence of binary symbols how do you extrapolate it? The answer being that we could assign a probability to a sequence and then use Bayes Theorem to make a prediction on which particular continuation of a string was how likely. That gives rise to an even more difficult question that was the basic question for a lot of Solomonoff’s work and on Algorithmic Probability/Algorithmic Information Theory. This question is : How do you assign probabilities to strings?

Solomonoff approached this problem using the idea of a Universal Turing Machine. Suppose this Turing Machine has three types of tapes, an unidirectional input tape, an unidirectional output tape and a bidirectional working tape. Suppose this machine will take some binary string as input and it may give a binary string as output.

It could do any of the following :

1. Print out a string after a while and then come to a stop.

2. It could print an infinite output string.

3. It could go in an infinite loop for computing the string and not output anything at all (Halting Problem).

For a string , the ALP would be as follows :

If we feed some bits at random to our Turing Machine, there will always be some probability that the output would start with a string . This probability is the algorithmic or universal probability of the string .

The ALP would be given as :

Where would be the universal probability of string with respect to the universal turing machine . To understand the placement of in the above expression, let’s discuss it a little.

There could be many random strings that after being processed by the Turing Machine give an output string that begins with string . And is the such string. Each such string carries a description of . And since we want to consider all cases, we take the summation. In the expression above gives the length of a string and the probability that the random input would output a string starting with .

This definition of ALP has the following properties that have been stated and proved by Solomonoff in the 60s and the 70s.

1. It assigns higher probabilities to strings with shorter descriptions. This is the reverse of something like Huffman Coding.

2. The value for ALP would be independent of the type of the universal machine used.

3. ALP is incomputible. This is the case because of the halting problem. Infact it is this reason that it has not received much attention. Why get interested in a model that is incomputible? However Solomonoff insisted that approximations to the ALP would be much better than existing systems and that getting the exact ALP is not even needed.

4. is a complete description for . That means any pattern in the data could be found by using . This means that the universal distribution is the only inductive principle that is complete. And approximations to it would be much desirable.

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Solomonoff also worked on Grammar discovery and was very interested in Koza’s Genetic Programming system, which he believed could lead to efficient and much better machine learning methods. He published papers till the ripe old age of 83 and is definitely inspiring for the love of his work.  Paul Vitanyi notes that :

It is unusual to find a productive major scientist that is not regularly employed at all. But from all the elder people (not only scientists) I know, Ray Solomonoff was the happiest, the most inquisitive, and the most satisfied. He continued publishing papers right up to his death at 83.

Solomonoff’s ideas are still not exploited to their full potential and in my opinion would be necessary to explore to build the Machine Learning dream of never-ending learners and incremental + synergistic Machine Learning. I would write about this in a later post pretty soon. It was a life of great distinction and a life well lived. I also wish strength and peace to his wife Grace and his nephew Alex.

The five surviving (in 2006) founders of AI who met in 2006 to commemorate 50 years of the Dartmouth Conference. From left : Trenchand Moore, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Selfridge and Ray Solomonoff

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Refernces and Links:

1. Ray Solomonoff’s publications.

2. Obituary: Ray Solomonoff – The founding father of Algorithmic Information Theory by Paul Vitanyi

3. The Universal Distribution and Machine Learning (PDF).

4. Universal Artificial Intelligence by Marcus Hutter (videolectures.net)

5. Minimum Description Length by Peter Grünwald (videolecures.net)

6. Universal Learning Algorithms and Optimal Search (Neural Information Processing Systems 2002 workshop)

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Some Interesting Courses: Neural Nets, Visualization, ML and Astrophysical Chemistry

Here are a number of interesting courses, two of which I am looking at for the past two weeks and that i would hopefully finish by the end of August-September.

Introduction to Neural Networks (MIT):

These days, amongst the other things that I have at hand including a project on content based image retrieval. I have been making it a point to look at a MIT course on Neural Networks. And needless to say, I am getting to learn loads.

I would like to emphasize that though I have implemented a signature verification system using Neural Nets, I am by no means good with them. I can be classified a beginner. The tool that I am more comfortable with are Support Vector Machines.

I have been wanting to know more about them for some years now, but I never really got the time or you can say the opportunity. Now that I can invest some time, I am glad I came across this course. So far I have been able to look at 7 lectures and I should say that I am MORE than very happy with the course. I think it is very detailed and extremely well suited for the beginner as well as the expert.

The instructor is H. Sebastian Seung who is the professor of computational neuroscience at the MIT.

The course has 25 lectures each one packed with a great amount of information. Meaning, the lectures might work slow for those who are not very familiar with this stuff.

The video lectures can be accessed over here. I must admit that i am a little disappointed that these lectures are not available on you-tube. That’s because the downloads are rather large in size. But I found them worth it any way.

The lectures cover the following:

Lecture 1: Classical neurodynamics
Lecture 2: Linear threshold neuron
Lecture 3: Multilayer perceptrons
Lecture 4: Convolutional networks and vision
Lecture 5: Amplification and attenuation
Lecture 6: Lateral inhibition in the retina
Lecture 7: Linear recurrent networks
Lecture 8: Nonlinear global inhibition
Lecture 9: Permitted and forbidden sets
Lecture 10: Lateral excitation and inhibition
Lecture 11: Objectives and optimization
Lecture 12: Excitatory-inhibitory networks
Lecture 13: Associative memory I
Lecture 14: Associative memory II
Lecture 15: Vector quantization and competitive learning
Lecture 16: Principal component analysis
Lecture 17: Models of neural development
Lecture 18: Independent component analysis
Lecture 19: Nonnegative matrix factorization. Delta rule.
Lecture 20: Backpropagation I
Lecture 21: Backpropagation II
Lecture 22: Contrastive Hebbian learning
Lecture 23: Reinforcement Learning I
Lecture 24: Reinforcement Learning II
Lecture 25: Review session

The good thing is that I have formally studied most of the stuff after lecture 13 , but going by the quality of lectures so far (first 7), I would not mind seeing them again.

Quick Links:

Course Home Page.

Course Video Lectures.

Prof H. Sebastian Seung’s Homepage.

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Visualization:

This is a Harvard course. I don’t know when I’ll get the time to have a look at this course, but it sure looks extremely interesting. And I am sure a number of people would be interested in having a look at it. It looks like a course that be covered up pretty quickly actually.

[Image Source]

The course description says the following:

The amount and complexity of information produced in science, engineering, business, and everyday human activity is increasing at staggering rates. The goal of this course is to expose you to visual representation methods and techniques that increase the understanding of complex data. Good visualizations not only present a visual interpretation of data, but do so by improving comprehension, communication, and decision making.

In this course you will learn how the human visual system processes and perceives images, good design practices for visualization, tools for visualization of data from a variety of fields, collecting data from web sites with Python, and programming of interactive visualization applications using Processing.

The topics covered are:

• Data and Image Models
• Visual Perception & Cognitive Principles
• Color Encoding
• Design Principles of Effective Visualizations
• Interaction
• Graphs & Charts
• Trees and Networks
• Maps & Google Earth
• Higher-dimensional Data
• Unstructured Text and Document Collections
• Images and Video
• Scientific Visualization
• Medical Visualization
• Social Visualization
• Visualization & The Arts

Quick Links:

Course Home Page.

Course Syllabus.

Lectures, Slides and other materials.

Video Lectures

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Advanced AI Techniques:

This is one course that I would  be looking at some parts of after I have covered the course on Neural Nets.  I am yet to glance at the first lecture or the materials, so i can not say how they would be like. But I sure am expecting a lot from them going by the topics they are covering.

The topics covered in a broad sense are:

• Bayesian Networks
• Statistical NLP
• Reinforcement Learning
• Bayes Filtering
• Distributed AI and Multi-Agent systems
• An Introduction to Game Theory

Quick Link:

Course Home.

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Astrophysical Chemistry:

I don’t know if I would be able to squeeze in time for these. But because of my amateurish interest in chemistry (If I were not an electrical engineer, I would have been into Chemistry), and because I have very high regard for Dr Harry Kroto (who is delivering them) I would try and make it a point to have a look at them. I think I’ll skip gym for some days to have a look at them. ;-)

[Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto with a Bucky-Ball model – Image Source : richarddawkins.net]

Quick Links:

Dr Harold Kroto’s Homepage.

Astrophysical Chemistry Lectures

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Face Recognition in Bees

I have been following Dr Adrian Dyer’s work for about a year. I discovered him and his work while searching on the Monash University website for research on vision, ML and related fields when a friend of mine was thinking of applying for a PhD there. Dr Dyer is a vision scientist and a top expert on Bees. His present research is based on investigating aspects of insect vision and  how insects make decisions in complex colored natural environments.

His current findings (published just about a  month or so back) could have important cues on how to make improvements in computer based facial recognition systems.

[Thermographic Image of a Bumblebee on a flower showing temperature difference : Image Source ]

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When i read about Dr Dyer’s most recent work I was instantly reminded of a rather similar experiment on pigeons done almost a decade and a half back by Watanabe et al ^[1] .

Digression: Van Gogh, Chagall and Pigeons

Allow me to take a brief digression and have a look at that classic experiment before returning to Bees. The experiment by Watanabe et al is my favorite when i have to initiate a general talk on WHAT is pattern recognition and generalization etc.

In the experiment, pigeons were placed in a skinner box and were trained to recognize paintings by two different artists (eg Van Gogh and Chagall). The training to recognize paintings by a particular artist was done by giving a reward on pecking when presented paintings by that artist.

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The pigeons were trained on a marked set of paintings by Van Gogh and Chagall. When tested on the SAME set they gave a discriminative ability of 95 %.  Then they were presented with paintings by the same artists that they had not previously seen. The ability of the pigeons to discriminate was still about 85%, which is a pretty high recognition rate. Interestingly this performance wasn’t much off human performance.

What this means is that pigeons do not memorize pictures but they can extract patterns (the “style” of painting etc) and can generalize from already seen data to make predictions on data never seen before. Isn’t this really what Artificial Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines do? And there is a lot of research going on to work to improve the generalization of these systems.

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Coming Back to Bees:

Dr Adrian Dyer’s group has been working on the visual information processing in miniature brains, brains that are much smaller than a primate brain. And honeybees provide a good model for working on such brains. One reason being that a lot about their behavior is known.

Their work has mostly been on color information processing in bees and how it could lend cues  for improvement in vision in robotic systems. Investigations have shown that the very small Bee brain can be taught to recognize extremely difficult/ complex objects.

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Color Vision in Bees ^[2] :

Research by Dr Dyer’s group on color vision in bees has provided key insights on the relationship between the perceptive abilities of bees and the flowers that they frequent. As an example it was known that flowers had evolved particular colors to suit the visual system of bees, but it was not known how it was that certain flower colors were extremely rare in nature. The color discrimination abilities of the Bees were tested by making a virtual meadow. There was high variability in the strategies used by bees to solve problems, however the discriminative abilities of the Bees were somewhat comparable to that of the Human sensory abilities. This research has shown not only how plants evolve flower colors to attract pollinators but also on what is the nature of color vision systems in nature and what are their limitations.

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Recognition of Rotated Objects (Faces) ^[3] :

The ability to recognize 3-Dimensional objects in natural environments is a challenging problem for visual systems especially in condition of rotation of object, variation in lighting conditions, occlusion etc. The effect of rotation on an object sometimes may cause it to look more dissimilar when compared to its rotated version than a non-rotated different object. Human and primate brains are known to recognize novel orientations of rotated objects by a method of interpolating between stored views. Primate brains perform better when presented with novel views that can be interpolated to from stored views than those novel views that required extrapolation beyond the stored views. Some animals, for example pigeons perform equally well on interpolated and extrapolated views.

To test how miniature brains, such as in Bees would deal with the problem posed by rotation of objects, Dr Dyer’s group presented Bees a face recognition task.  The bees were trained for different views (0, 30 and 60 degrees) of two similar faces S1 and S2, these are enough for getting an insight on how the brain solves the problem of a view with which it has no prior experience. The Bees were trained with face images from a standard test for studying vision for human infants.

[Image Source – 3]

Group 1 of bees was trained for 0 degree orientation and then was given a non-reward test on the same view and that of a novel 30 degree view.

Group 2 was trained for 60 degree orientation and then was tested on the same view (non-reward) and a novel 30 degree view.

Group 3 was trained for both the 0 degree and 60 degree orientations and then was tested on the same and novel 30 degree interpolation visual stimuli.

Group 4 was trained with both 0 degree and 30 degree orientations and then was tested on the same and also the novel 60 degree extrapolation view.

Bees in all of the four groups were able to recognize the trained target stimuli well above the chance values. But when presented with novel views Group 1 and Group 2 could not recognize novel views, while Group 3 could. They could do so by interpolating between the 0 degree and the 60 degree views. Group 4 too could not recognize novel views presented to it, indicating that Bees could not extrapolate from the 0 and 30 degree training to recognize faces oriented at 60 degrees.

The experiment puts forth that a miniature brain can learn to recognize complex visual stimuli by experience by a method of image interpolation and averaging. However the performance is bad when the stimuli required extrapolation.

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Bees performed poorly on images that were inverted. But in this regard they are in good company,  even humans do not perform well when images are inverted. As an illustration consider these two images:

How similar do these two inverted images look to be at first glance? Very similar? Let’s now have a look at the upright images. The one on the left below corresponds to the image on the left above.

[Image Source]

The upright images look very different, even though the inverted images looked very similar.

I would recommend an exercise on rotating the image on the right to its upright position and back, please follow this link for doing so. This was a good illustration of the fact that the human visual system does not perform AS well with inverted images.

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The findings show that despite the constrained neural resources of the bee brain (about 0.01 percent as compared to humans) they can perform remarkably well at complex visual recognition tasks. Dr Dyer says this could lead to improved models in artificial systems as this test is evidence that face recognition does not require an extremely advanced nervous system.

The conclusion is that the Bee brain, which is small (about 850,000 neurons) can be simulated with relative ease (as compared to what was previously thought for complex pattern analysis and recognition) for performing rather complex pattern recognition tasks.

On a lighter note, Dr Dyer also says that his findings don’t justify the adage that you should not kill a bee otherwise its nest mates will remember you to take revenge. ;-)

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References and Recommended Papers:

[1] Van Gogh, Chagall and Pigeons: Picture Discrimination in Pigeons and Humans in “Animal Cognition”, Springer Varlag – Shigeru Watanabe.

[2] The Evolution of Flower Signals to Attract Pollinators – Adrian Dyer.

[3] Insect Brains use Image Interpolation Mechanisms to Recognise Rotated Objects in “PLos One” – Adrian Dyer, Quoc Vuong.

[4] Honeybees can recognize complex images of Natural scenes for use as Potential Landmarks – Dyer, Rosa, Reser.

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Face Recognition using Eigenfaces and Distance Classifiers: A Tutorial

Why?

Two Reasons:

1. Eigenfaces is probably one of the simplest face recognition methods and also rather old, then why worry about it at all? Because, while it is simple it works quite well. And it’s simplicity also makes it a good way to understand how face recognition/dimensionality reduction etc works.

2. I was thinking of writing a post based on face recognition in Bees next, so this should serve as a basis for the next post too. The idea of this post is to give a simple introduction to the topic with an emphasis on building intuition. For more rigorous treatments, look at the references.

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Introduction

Like almost everything associated with the Human body –  The Brain, perceptive abilities, cognition and consciousness, face recognition in humans is a wonder. We are not yet even close to an understanding of how we manage to do it. What is known is that it is that the Temporal Lobe in the brain is partly responsible for this  ability. Damage to the temporal lobe can result in the condition in which the concerned person can lose the ability to recognize faces. This specific condition where  an otherwise normal person who suffered some damage to a specific region in the temporal lobe loses the ability to recognize faces is called prosopagnosia. It is a very interesting condition  as  the perception of faces remains normal (vision pathways and perception is fine) and the person can recognize people by their voice but not by faces. In one of my previous posts, which had links to a series of lectures by Dr Vilayanur Ramachandran, I did link to one lecture by him in which he talks in detail about this condition. All this aside, not much is known how the perceptual information for a face is coded in the brain too.

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A Motivating Parallel

Eigenfaces has a parallel to one of the most fundamental ideas in mathematics and signal processing – The Fourier Series. This parallel is also very helpful to build an intuition to what Eigenfaces (or PCA) sort of does and hence must be exploited. Hence we review the Fourier Series in a few sentences.

Fourier series are named so in the honor of Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (Generally Fourier is pronounced as “fore-yay”, however the correct French pronunciation is “foor-yay”) who made important contributions to their development. Representation of a signal in the form of a linear combination of complex sinusoids is called the Fourier Series. What this means is that you can’t just split a periodic signal into simple sines and cosines, but you can also approximately reconstruct that signal given you have information how the sines and cosines that make it up are stacked.

More Formally: Put in more formal terms, suppose is a periodic function with period defined in the interval and satisfies a set of conditions called the Dirichlet’s conditions:

1. is finite, single valued and its integral exists in the interval.

2. has a finite number of discontinuities in the interval.

3. has a finite number of extrema in that interval.

then can be represented by the trigonometric series

The above representation of is called the Fourier series and the coefficients , and are called the fourier coefficients and are determined from by Euler’s formulae. The coefficients are given as :

Note: It is common to define the above using

An example that illustrates or the Fourier series is:

[Image Source]

A square wave (given in black) can be approximated to by using a series of sines and cosines (result of this summation shown in blue). Clearly in the limiting case, we could reconstruct the square wave exactly with simply sines and cosines.

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Though not exactly the same, the idea behind Eigenfaces is similar. The aim is to represent a face as a linear combination of a set of basis images (in the Fourier Series the bases were simply sines and cosines). That is :

Where represents the face with the mean subtracted from it, represent weights and the eigenvectors. If this makes somewhat sketchy sense then don’t worry. This was just like mentioning at the start what we have to do.

The big idea is that you want to find a set of images (called Eigenfaces, which are nothing but Eigenvectors of the training data) that if you weigh and add together should give you back a image that you are interested in (adding images together should give you back an image, Right?). The way you weight these basis images (i.e the weight vector) could be used as a sort of a code for that image-of-interest and could be used as features for recognition.

This can be represented aptly in a figure as:

Click to Enlarge

In the above figure, a face that was in the training database was reconstructed by taking a weighted summation of all the basis faces and then adding to them the mean face. Please note that in the figure the ghost like basis images (also called as Eigenfaces, we’ll see why they are called so) are not in order of their importance. They have just been picked randomly from a pool of 70 by me. These Eigenfaces were prepared using images  from the MIT-CBCL database (also I have adjusted the brightness of the Eigenfaces to make them clearer after obtaining them, therefore the brightness of the reconstructed image looks different than those of the basis images).

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An Information Theory Approach:

First of all the idea of Eigenfaces considers face recognition as a 2-D recognition problem, this is based on the assumption that at the time of recognition, faces will be mostly upright and frontal. Because of this, detailed 3-D information about the face is not needed. This reduces complexity by a significant bit.

Before the method for face recognition using Eigenfaces was introduced, most of the face recognition literature dealt with local and intuitive features, such as distance between eyes, ears and similar other features. This wasn’t very effective. Eigenfaces inspired by a method used in an earlier paper was a significant departure from the idea of using only intuitive features. It uses an Information Theory appraoch wherein the most relevant face information is encoded in a group of faces that will best distinguish the faces. It transforms the face images in to a set of basis faces, which essentially are the principal components of the face images.

The Principal Components (or Eigenvectors) basically seek directions in which it is more efficient to  represent the data. This is particularly useful for reducing the computational effort. To understand this,  suppose we get 60 such directions, out of these about 40 might be insignificant and only 20 might represent the variation in data significantly, so for calculations it would work quite well to only use the 20 and leave out the rest.  This is illustrated by this figure:

Click to Enlarge

Such an information theory approach will encode not only the local features but also the global features. Such features may or may not be intuitively understandable. When we find the principal components or the Eigenvectors of the image set, each Eigenvector has some contribution from EACH face used in the training set. So the Eigenvectors also have a face like appearance. These look ghost like and are ghost images or Eigenfaces. Every image in the training set can be represented as a weighted linear combination of these basis faces.

The number of Eigenfaces that we would obtain therefore would be equal to the number of images in the training set. Let us take this number to be . Like I mentioned one paragraph before, some of these Eigenfaces are more important in encoding the variation in face images, thus we could also approximate faces using only the most significant Eigenfaces.

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Assumptions:

1. There are images in the training set.

2. There are most significant Eigenfaces using which we can satisfactorily approximate a face. Needless to say K < M.

3. All images are matrices, which can be represented as dimensional vectors. The same logic would apply to images that are not of equal length and breadths. To take an example: An image of size 112 x 112 can be represented as a vector of dimension 12544 or simply as a point in a 12544 dimensional space.

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Algorithm for Finding Eigenfaces:

1. Obtain training images , … , it is very important that the images are centered.

2. Represent each image as a vector   as discussed above.

Note: Due to a recent WordPress bug, there is some trouble with constructing matrices with multiple columns. To avoid confusion and to maintain continuity, for the time being I am posting an image for the above formula that’s showing an error message. Same goes for some formulae below in the post.

3. Find the average face vector .

4. Subtract the mean face from each face vector to get a set of vectors . The purpose of subtracting the mean image from each image vector is to be left with only the distinguishing features from each face and “removing” in a way information that is common.

5. Find the Covariance matrix :

, where

Note that the Covariance matrix has simply been made by putting one modified image vector obtained in  one column each.

Also note that is a matrix and is a matrix.

6. We now need to calculate the Eigenvectors of , However note that is a matrix and it would return Eigenvectors each being dimensional. For an image this number is HUGE.  The computations required would easily make your system run out of memory. How do we get around this problem?

7. Instead of the Matrix consider the matrix . Remember is a matrix, thus is a matrix. If we find the Eigenvectors of this matrix, it would return Eigenvectors, each of Dimension , let’s call these Eigenvectors .

Now from some properties of matrices, it follows that: . We have found out earlier. This implies that using we can calculate the M largest Eigenvectors of . Remember that as M is simply the number of training images.

8. Find the best Eigenvectors of by using the relation discussed above. That is: . Also keep in mind that .

[6 Eigenfaces for the training set chosen from the MIT-CBCL database, these are not in any order]

9. Select the best Eigenvectors, the selection of these Eigenvectors is done heuristically.

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Finding Weights:

The Eigenvectors found at the end of the previous section, when converted to a matrix in a process that is reverse to that in STEP 2, have a face like appearance. Since these are Eigenvectors and have a face like appearance, they are called Eigenfaces. Sometimes, they are also called as Ghost Images because of their weird appearance.

Now each face in the training set (minus the mean), can be represented as a linear combination of these Eigenvectors :

m, where ‘s are Eigenfaces.

These weights can be calculated as :

.

Each normalized training image is represented in this basis as a vector.

where i = 1,2… M. This means we have to calculate such a vector corresponding to every image in the training set and store them as templates.

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Recognition Task:

Now consider we have found out the Eigenfaces for the training images , their associated weights after selecting a set of most relevant Eigenfaces and have stored these vectors corresponding to each training image.

If an unknown probe face is to be recognized then:

1. We normalize the incoming probe as .

2. We then project this normalized probe onto the Eigenspace (the collection of Eigenvectors/faces) and find out the weights.

.

3. The normalized probe can then simply be represented as:

After the feature vector (weight vector) for the probe has been found out, we simply need to classify it. For the classification task we could simply use some distance measures or use some classifier like Support Vector Machines (something that I would cover in an upcoming post). In case we use distance measures, classification is done as:

Find . This means we take the weight vector of the probe we have just found out and find its distance with the weight vectors associated with each of the training image.

And if , where is a threshold chosen heuristically, then we can say that the probe image is recognized as the image with which it gives the lowest score.

If however then the probe does not belong to the database. I will come to the point on how the threshold should be chosen.

For distance measures the most commonly used measure is the Euclidean Distance. The other being the Mahalanobis Distance. The Mahalanobis distance generally gives superior performance. Let’s take a brief digression and look at these two simple distance measures and then return to the task of choosing a threshold.

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Distance Measures:

Euclidean Distance: The Euclidean Distance is probably the most widely used distance metric. It is a special case of a general class of norms and is given as:

The Mahalanobis Distance: The Mahalanobis Distance is a better distance measure when it comes to pattern recognition problems. It takes into account the covariance between the variables and hence removes the problems related to scale and correlation that are inherent with the Euclidean Distance. It is given as:

Where is the covariance between the variables involved.

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Deciding on the Threshold:

Why is the threshold, important?

Consider for simplicity we have ONLY 5 images in the training set. And a probe that is not in the training set comes up for the recognition task. The score for each of the 5 images will be found out with the incoming probe. And even if an image of the probe is not in the database, it will still say the probe is recognized as the training image with which its score is the lowest. Clearly this is an anomaly that we need to look at. It is for this purpose that we decide the threshold. The threshold is decided heuristically.

Click to Enlarge

Now to illustrate what I just said, consider a simpson image as a non-face image, this image will be scored with each of the training images. Let’s say is the lowest score out of all. But the probe image is clearly not beloning to the database. To choose the threshold we choose a large set of random images (both face and non-face), we then calculate the scores for images of people in the database and also for this random set and set the threshold (which I have mentioned in the “recognition” part above) accordingly.

_____

More on the Face Space:

To conclude this post, here is a brief discussion on the face space.

[Image Source – [1]]

Consider a simplified representation of the face space as shown in the figure above. The images of a face, and in particular the faces in the training set should lie near the face space. Which in general describes images that are face like.

The projection distance should be under a threshold as already seen. The images of known individual fall near some face class in the face space.

There are four possible combinations on where an input image can lie:

1. Near a face class and near the face space : This is the case when the probe is nothing but the facial image of a known individual (known = image of this person is already in the database).

2. Near face space but away from face class : This is the case when the probe image is of a person (i.e a facial image), but does not belong to anybody in the database i.e away from any face class.

3. Distant from face space and near face class : This happens when the probe image is not of a face however it still resembles a particular face class stored in the database.

4. Distant from both the face space and face class: When the probe is not a face image i.e is away from the face space and is nothing like any face class stored.

Out of the four, type 3 is responsible for most false positives. To avoid them, face detection is recommended to be a part of such a system.

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References and Important Papers

1.Face Recognition Using Eigenfaces, Matthew A. Turk and Alex P. Pentland, MIT Vision and Modeling Lab, CVPR ’91.

2. Eigenfaces Versus Fischerfaces : Recognition using Class Specific Linear Projection, Belhumeur, Hespanha, Kreigman, PAMI ’97.

3. Eigenfaces for Recognition, Matthew A. Turk and Alex P. Pentland, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ’91.

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Related Posts:

1. Face Recognition/Authentication using Support Vector Machines

2. Why are Support Vector Machines called so

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MATLAB Codes:

I suppose the MATLAB codes for the above are available on atleast 2-3 locations around the internet.

However it might be useful to put out some starter code. Note that the variables have the same names as those in the description above.You may use this mat file for testing. These are the labels for that mat file.

%This is the starter code for only the part for finding eigenfaces.
load('features_faces.mat'); % load the file that has the images.
%In this case load the .mat filed attached above.
% use reshape command to see an image which is stored as a row in the above.

% The code is only skeletal.
% Find psi - mean image
Psi_train = mean(features_faces')';
% Find Phi - modified representation of training images.
% 548 is the total number of training images.
for i = 1:548
    Phi(:,i) = raw_features(:,i) - Psi_train;
end
% Create a matrix from all modified vector images
A = Phi;
% Find covariance matrix using trick above
C = A'*A;
[eig_mat, eig_vals] = eig(C);
% Sort eigen vals to get order
eig_vals_vect = diag(eig_vals);
[sorted_eig_vals, eig_indices] = sort(eig_vals_vect,'descend');
sorted_eig_mat = zeros(548);
for i=1:548
    sorted_eig_mat(:,i) = eig_mat(:,eig_indices(i));
end
% Find out Eigen faces
Eig_faces = (A*sorted_eig_mat);
size_Eig_faces=size(Eig_faces);
% Display an eigenface using the reshape command.

% Find out weights for all eigenfaces
% Each column contains weight for corresponding image
W_train = Eig_faces'*Phi;
face_fts = W_train(1:250,:)'; % features using 250 eigenfaces.

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Chemoton § Vitorino Ramos’ research notebook

Well just a fortnight or so back I discovered that Dr Radford Neal, one of the top researchers in Statistics and Machine Learning was blogging. And today morning I discovered Dr Vitorino Ramos has been blogging for over a week now too!

This comes as a surprise, but a very pleasant one. I am very glad to have found his page, it promises to be a very different Web-Log and could indeed grow into one of the top blogs on Swarming, Self-Organization, Complexity and Distributed Systems as it would be by a leading expert in the field. It would be great to catch up on his work. In the past I have tried to write on some of his interesting work on my own page. My posts can be found here.

[Vitorino Ramos: Image Source]

Dr Ramos’ research areas are chiefly in Artificial Life, Artificial Intelligence, Bio-Inspired Computing, Collective Intelligence and Complex Systems. He obtained his PhD in 2004 and has published about 70 papers in the above fields and their broad application areas. So put simply it can be said that the IQ of the “blogosphere” has gone up a little with this addition.

For starters I would recommend his article on Financial Markets (given the situation today), talking about the herd mentality and the resulting amplification in dumb investors and its results and what it could result in. Most investors do not understand much of the market mechanism. This is a bare fact put most aptly in this cartoon I found on his blog, and his post goes much beyond that.

[Image Source]

Click to Enlarge

And going by the website and blog name, it seems that Dr Ramos is now interested in some sense in Tibor Ganti’s Chemoton Theory.

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Quick Links:

1. Vitorino Ramos’ Homepage.

2. Dr Ramos’ Publications. (PDFs available online)

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Demystifying Support Vector Machines for Beginners: A Reading List

Though I have worked on pattern recognition in the past I have always wanted to work with Neural Networks for the same. However for some reason or the other I could never do so, I could not even take it as an elective subject due to some constraints. Over the last two years or so I have been promising myself and ordering myself to stick to a schedule and study ANNs properly, however due to a combination of procrastination, over-work and bad planning I have never been able to do anything with them.

However I have now got the opportunity to work with Support Vector Machines and over the past some time I have been reading extensively on the same and have been trying to get playing with them. Now that the actual implementation and work is set to start I am pretty excited to work with them. It is nice that I get to work with SVMs though I could not with ANNs.

Support Vector Machine is a classifier derived from statistical learning theory by Vladimir Vapnik and his co-workers. The foundations for the same were laid by him as late as the 1970s SVM shot to prominence when using pixel maps as input it gave an accuracy comparable with sophisticated Neural Networks with elaborate features in a handwriting recognition task.

Traditionally Neural Networks based approaches have suffered some serious drawbacks, especially with generalization, producing models that can overfit the data. SVMs embodies the structural risk minimization principle that is shown superior to the empirical risk minimization that neural networks use. This difference gives SVMs the greater ability to generalize.

However learning how to work with SVMs can be challenging and somewhat intimidating at first. When i started reading on the topic I took the books by Vapnik on the subject but could not make much head or tail. I could only attain a certain degree of understanding, nothing more. To specialize in something I do well when I start off as a generalist, having a good and quite correct idea of what is exactly going on. Knowing in general what is to be done and what is what, after this initial know-how makes me comfortable I reach the stage of starting with the mathematics which gives profound understanding as anything without mathematics is meaningless. However most books that I came across missed the first point for me, and it was very difficult to make a headstart. There was a book which I could read in two days that helped me get that general picture quite well. I would highly recommend it for most who are in the process of starting with SVMs.The book is titled Support Vector Machines and other Kernel Based Learning methods and is authored by Nello Cristianini and John-Shawe Taylor.

I would highly recommend people who are starting with Support Vector Machines to buy this book. It can  be obtained easily over Amazon.

This book has very less of a Mathematical treatment but it makes clear the ideas involved and this introduces a person studying from it to think more clearly before he/she can refine his/her understanding by reading something heavier mathematically. Another that I would highly recommend is the book Support Vector Machines for Pattern Classification by Shigeo Abe.

Another book that I highly recommend is Learning with Kernels by Bernhard Scholkopf and Alexander Smola. Perfect book for beginners.

Only after one has covered the required stuff from here that I would suggest Vapnik’s books which then would work wonderfully well.

Other than the books there are a number of Video Lectures and tutorials on the Internet that can work as well!

Below is a listing of a large number of good tutorials on the topic. I don’t intend to flood a person interested in starting with too much information, where ever possible i have described what the document carries so that one could decide what should suffice for him/her on the basis of need. Also I have star-marked some of the posts. This marks the ones that i have seen and studied from personally and found them most helpful and i am sure they would work the same way with both beginners and people with reasonable experience alike.

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Webcasts/ Video Lectures on Learning Theory, Support Vector Machines and related ideas:

EDIT: For those interested. I had posted about a course on Machine Learning that has been provided by Stanford university. It too is suited for an introduction to Support Vector Machines. Please find the post here. Also this comment might be helpful, suggestions to it according to your learning journey are also welcome.

1. *Machine Learning Workshop, University of California at Berkeley. This series covers most of the basics required. Beginners can skip the sessions on Bayesian models and Manifold Learning.

Workshop Outline:

Session 1: Classification.

Session 2: Regression.

Session 3: Feature Selection

Session 4: Diagnostics

Session 5: Clustering

Session 6: Graphical Models

Session 7: Linear Dimensionality Reduction

Session 8: Manifold Learning and Visualization

Session 9: Structured Classification

Session 10: Reinforcement Learning

Session 11: Non-Parametric Bayesian Models

2. Washington University. Beginners might be interested on the sole talk on the topic of Supervised Learning for Computer Vision Applications or maybe in the talk on Dimensionality Reduction.

3. Reinforcement Learning, Universitat Freiburg.

4. Deep Learning Workshop. Good talks, But I’d say these are meant for only the highly interested.

5. *Introduction to Learning Theory, Olivier Bousquet.

This tutorial focuses on the “larger picture” than on mathematical proofs, it is not restricted to statistical learning theory however. The course comprises of five lectures and is quite good to watch. The Frenchman is both smart and fun!

6. *Statistical Learning Theory, Olivier Bousquet. This course gives a detailed introduction to Learning Theory with a focus on the Classification problem.

Course Outline:

Probabilistic and Concentration inequalities, Union Bounds, Chaining, Measuring the size of a function class, Vapnik Chervonenkis Dimension, Shattering Dimensions and Rademacher averages, Classification with real valued functions.

7. *Statistical Learning Theory, Olivier Bousquet. This is not the repeat of the above course. This one is a more recent lecture series than the above actually. This course has six lectures. Another excellent set.

Course Outline:

Learning Theory: Foundations and Goals

Learning Bounds: Ingredients and Results

Implications: What to conclude from bounds

7. Advanced Statistical Learning Theory, Olivier Bousquet. This set of lectures compliment the above courses on statistical learning theory and give a more detailed exposition of the current advancements in the same.This course has three lectures.

Course Outline:

PAC Bayesian bounds: a simple derivation, comparison with Rademacher averages, Local Rademacher complexity with classification loss, Talagrand’s inequality. Tsybakov noise conditions, Properties of loss functions for classification (influence on approximation and estimation, relationship with noise conditions), Applications to SVM – Estimation and approximation properties, role of eigenvalues of the Gram matrix.

8. *Statistical Learning Theory, John-Shawe Taylor, University of London. One plus point of this course is that is has some good English. Don’t miss this lecture as it has been given by the same professor whose book we just discussed.

9. *Learning with Kernels, Bernhard Scholkopf.

This course covers the basics for Support Vector Machines and related Kernel methods. This course has six lectures.

Course Outline:

Kernel and Feature Spaces, Large Margin Classification, Basic Ideas of Learning Theory, Support Vector Machines, Other Kernel Algorithms.

10. Kernel Methods, Alexander Smola, Australian National University.  This is an advanced course as compared to the above and covers exponential families, density estimation, and conditional estimators such as Gaussian Process classification, regression, and conditional random fields, Moment matching techniques in Hilbert space that can be used to design two-sample tests and independence tests in statistics.

11. *Introduction to Kernel Methods, Bernhard Scholkopf, There are four parts to this course.

Course Outline:

Kernels and Feature Space, Large Margin Classification, Basic Ideas of Learning Theory, Support Vector Machines, Examples of Other Kernel Algorithms.

12. Introduction to Kernel Methods, Partha Niyogi.

13. Introduction to Kernel Methods, Mikhail Belkin, Ohio State University.This lecture is second in part to the above.

14. *Kernel Methods in Statistical Learning, John-Shawe Taylor.

15. *Support Vector Machines, Chih-Jen Lin, National Taiwan University. Easily one of the best talks on SVM. Almost like a run-down tutorial.

Course Outline:

Basic concepts for Support Vector Machines, training and optimization procedures of SVM, Classification and SVM regression.

16. *Kernel Methods and Support Vector Machines, Alexander Smola. A comprehensive six lecture course.

Course Outline:

Introduction of the main ideas of statistical learning theory, Support Vector Machines, Kernel Feature Spaces, An overview of the applications of Kernel Methods.

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Additional Courses:

1. Basics of Probability and Statistics for Machine Learning, Mikaela Keller.

This course covers most of the basics that would be required for the above courses. However sometimes the shooting quality is a little shady. This talk seems to be the most popular on the video lectures site, one major reason in my opinion is that the lady delivering the lecture is quite pretty!

2. Some Mathematical Tools for Machine Learning, Chris Burges.

3. Machine Learning Laboratory, S.V.N Vishwanathan.

4. Machine Learning Laboratory, Chrisfried Webers.

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Introductory Tutorials (PDF/PS):

1. *Support Vector Machines with Applications (Statistical Science). Click here >>

2. *Support Vector Machines (Marti Hearst, UC Berkeley). Click Here >>

3. *Support Vector Machines- Hype or Hallelujah (K. P. Bennett, RPI). Click Here >>

4. Support Vector Machines and Pattern Recognition (Georgia Tech). Click Here >>

5. An Introduction to Support Vector Machines in Data Mining (Georgia Tech). Click Here >>

6. University of Wisconsin at Madison CS 769 (Zhu). Click Here >>

7. Generalized Support Vector Machines (Mangasarian, University of Wisconsin at Madison). Click Here >>

8. *A Practical Guide to Support Vector Classification (Hsu, Chang, Lin, Via U-Michigan Ann Arbor). Click Here >>

9. *A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition (Christopher J.C Burges, Bell Labs Lucent Technologies, Data mining and knowledge Discovery). Click Here >>

10. Support Vector Clustering (Hur, Horn, Siegelmann, Journal of Machine Learning Research. Via MIT). Click Here >>

11. *What is a Support Vector Machine (Noble, MIT). Click Here >>

12. Notes on PCA, Regularization, Sparisty and Support Vector Machines (Poggio, Girosi, MIT Dept of Brain and Cognitive Sciences). Click Here >>

13. *CS 229 Lecture Notes on Support Vector Machines (Andrew Ng, Stanford University). Click Here >>

—

Introductory Slides (mostly lecture slides):

1. Support Vector Machines in Machine Learning (Arizona State University). Click here >>

Lecture Outline:

What is Machine Learning, Solving the Quadratic Programs, Three very different approaches, Comparison on medium and large sets.

2. Support Vector Machines (Arizona State University). Click Here >>

Lecture Outline:

The Learning Problem, What do we know about test data, The capacity of a classifier, Shattering, The Hyperplane Classifier, The Kernel Trick, Quadratic Programming.

3. Support Vector Machines, Linear Case (Jieping Ye, Arizona State University). Click Here >>

Lecture Outline:

Linear Classifiers, Maximum Margin Classifier, SVM for Separable data, SVM for non-separable data.

4. Support Vector Machines, Non Linear Case (Jieping Ye, Arizona State University). Click Here >>

Lecture Outline:

Non Linear SVM using basis functions, Non-Linear SVMs using Kernels, SVMs for Multi-class Classification, SVM path, SVM for unbalanced data.

5. Support Vector Machines (Sue Ann Hong, Carnegie Mellon). Click Here >>

6. Support Vector Machines (Carnegie Mellon University Machine Learning 10701/15781). Click Here >>

7. Support Vector Machines and Kernel Methods (CMU). Click Here >>

8. SVM Tutorail (Columbia University). Click Here >>

9. Support Vector Machines (Via U-Maryland at College Park). Click Here >>

10. Support Vector Machines: Algorithms and Applications (MIT OCW). Click Here >>

11. Support Vector Machines (MIT OCW). Click Here >>

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Papers/Notes on some basic related ideas (No estoric research papers here):

1. Robust Feature Induction for Support Vector Machines (Arizona State University). Click Here >>

2. Hidden Markov Support Vector Machines (Brown University). Click Here >>

3. *Training Data Set for Support Vector Machines (Brown University). Click Here >>

4. Support Vector Machines are Universally Consistent (Journal Of Complexity). Click Here >>

5. Feature Selection for Classification of Variable Length Multi-Attribute Motions (Li, Khan, Prabhakaran). Click Here >>

6. Selecting Data for Fast Support Vector Machine Training (Wang, Neskovic, Cooper). Click Here >>

7. *Normalization in Support Vector Machines (Caltech). Click Here >>

8. The Support Vector Decomposition Machine (Periera, Gordon, Carnegie Mellon). Click Here >>

9. Semi-Supervised Support Vector Machines (Bennett, Demiriz, RPI). Click Here >>

10. Supervised Clustering with Support Vector Machines (Finley, Joachims, Cornell University). Click Here >>

11. Metric Learning: A Support Vector Approach (Cornell University). Click Here >>

12. Training Linear SVMs in Linear Time (Joachims, Cornell Unversity). Click Here >>

13. *Rule Extraction from Linear Support Vector Machines (Fung, Sandilya, Rao, Siemens Medical Solutions). Click Here >>

14. Support Vector Machines, Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces and Randomizeed GACV (Wahba, University of Wisconsian at Madison). Click Here >>

15. The Mathematics of Learning: Dealing with Data (Poggio, Girosi, AI Lab, MIT). Click Here >>

16. Training Invariant Support Vector Machines (Decoste, Scholkopf, Machine Learning). Click Here >>

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*As I have already mentioned above, the star marked courses/lectures/tutorials/papers are the ones that I have seen and studied from personally (and hence can vouch for) and these in my opinion should work best for beginners.

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Kafka to Red Ant: A Strange Metamorphosis

Before I make a start I would want to make it very clear that inspite of what that the title may suggest, this is not a “sensational” post. It is just something that really intrigued me. It basically falls under the domain of image segmentation and pattern recognition, however it is something that can intrigue a person with a non-scientific background with a like (or dislike) for Franz Kafka’s work equally. I keep the title because it is the title of an original work by Dr Vitorino Ramos and hence making changes to it is not a good thing.

Note: For people who are  not interested in technical details can skip those parts and only read the stuff in bold there.

Franz Kafka is one writer whose works have had a profound impact on me in terms that they disturbed me each time I thought about them. No, not because of his writings per se ONLY but for a greater part because i had read a lot on his rather tragic life and i saw a heart breaking reflection in his works of what happened in his life (i see a lot of similarities between Kafka’s life and that of Premchand albeit that Premchand’s work got published in his lifetime mostly, though he got true critical acclaim after his death). Yes i do think that his writings give a good picture of Europe at that time, on human needs and behavior, but the prior reason outweighs all these. Kafka remains one of my favorite writers, though his works are basically short stories. He mostly wrote on a theme that emphasized the alienation of man and the indifferent society. Kafka’s tormenting thoughts on dehumanization, the cruel world, bureaucratic labyrinths which he experienced as being part of the not so liked Jewish minority in Prague, his experiences in jobs he did, his love life and affairs, on a constant fear of mental and physical collapse as a result of clinical depression and the ill health that he suffered from, reflected in a lot of his works. Including in his novella The Metamorphosis.

W. H Auden rightly wrote about Kafka:

“Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of the modern man”

In metamorphosis the protagonist Gregor Samsa turns into a giant insect when he wakes up one morning. It is kind of apparent that the “transformation” was meant in a metaphorical sense by Kafka and not in a literal one, mostly based on his fears and his own life experiences. The Novella starts like this. . .

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

—

While rummaging through a few scientific papers that explored the problem of pattern recognition using a distributed approach i came across a few by Dr Ramos et al, which dealt with the issue using the artificial colonies approach.

In the previous post i had mentioned that the self organization of neurons into a brain like structure and the self organization of an ant colony were similar in more than a few ways. If it may be implemented then it could have implications in pattern recognition problems, where the perceptive abilities emerge from the local and simple interactions of simple agents. Such decentralized systems, a part of the swarm intelligence paradigm look very promising in applying to pattern recognition and the specific case of image segmentation as basically these may be considered a clustering and combinatorial problem taking the image itself as an ant colony habit.

The basis for this post was laid down in the previous post on colony cognitive maps. We observed the evolution of a pheromonal field there and a simple model for the same:

[Evolution of a distribution of (artificial) ants over time: Image Source]

Click to Enlarge

The above is the evolution of the distribution of artificial ants in a square lattice, this work has been extended to digital image lattices by Ramos et al. Image segmentation is an image processing problem wherein the regions of the image under consideration may be partitioned into different regions. Like into areas of low contrast and areas of high contrast, on basis of texture and grey level and so on. Image segmentation is very important as the output of an image segmentation process may be used as an input in object recognition based scenarios. The work of Ramos et al (In references below) and some of the papers cited in his works have really intrigued me and i would strongly suggest readers to have a look at them if at all they are interested in image segmentation, pattern recognition and self organization in general, some might also be interested in implementing something similar too!

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In one of the papers a swarm of artificial ants was thrown on a digital habitat (an image of Albert Einstein) to explore it for 1000 iterations. The Einstein image is replaced by a map image. The evolution of the colony cognitive maps for the Einstein image habitat is shown below for various iterations.

[Evolution of a pheromonal field on an Einstein image habitat for t= 0, 1, 100, 110, 120, 130, 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, 800, 900, 1000: Image Source]

The above is represented most aptly in a .gif image.

[Evolution of a pheromonal field on an Einstein habitat: Image Source]

Now instead of Einstein a Kafka image was taken and was subject to the same. Image Source

The Kafka image habitat is replaced by a red ant in the second row. The abstract of the paper by the same name goes as.

Created with an Artificial Ant Colony, that uses images as Habitats, being sensible to their gray levels. At the second row,  Kafka is replaced as a substrate, by Red Ant. In black, the higher levels of pheromone (a chemical evaporative sugar substance used by swarms on their orientation trough out the trails). It’s exactly this artificial evaporation and the computational ant collective group synergy reallocating their upgrades of pheromone at interesting places, that allows for the emergence of adaptation and “perception” of new images. Only some of the 6000 iterations processed are represented. The system does not have any type of hierarchy, and ants communicate only in indirect forms, through out the successive alteration that they found on the Habitat.

Now what intrigues me is that the transition is extremely rapid. Such perceptive ability with change in the image habitat could have massive implications at how we look at pattern recognition for such cases.

Extremely intriguing!

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Resources on Franz Kafka:

1. A Brief Biography

2. The Metamorphosis At Project Gutenberg. Click here >>

3. The Kafka Project

References and STRONGLY recommended papers:

1. Artificial Ant Colonies in Digital Image Habitats – A Mass behavior Effect Study on Pattern Recognition. Vitorino Ramos and Filipe Almeida. Click Here >>

2. Social Cognitive Maps, Swarms Collective Perception and Distributed Search on Dynamic Landscapes. Vitorino Ramos, Carlos Fernandes, Agostinho C. Rosa. Click Here >>

3. Self-Regulated Artificial Ant Colonies on Digital Image Habitats. Carlos Fernandes, Vitorino Ramos, Agostinho C. Rosa. Click Here >>

4. On the Implicit and the Artificial – Morphogenesis and Emergent Aesthetics in Autonomous Collective Systems. Vitorino Ramos. Click Here >>

5. A Strange Metamorphosis [Kafka to Red Ant], Vitorino Ramos.

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Colony Cognitive Maps

Some posts back, i posted on Non-Human Art or Swarm Paintings, there I mentioned that those paintings were NOT random but were a Colony Cognitive Map.

This post will serve as the conceptual basis for the Swarm Paintings post, the next post and a few future posts on image segmentation.

Motivation: Some might wonder what is the point of writing about such a topic. And that it is totally unrelated to what i write about generally. No! That is not the case. Most of the stuff I write about is related in some sense. Well the motivation for reading thoroughly about this (and writing) maybe condensed into the following:

1. The idea of a colony cognitive map is used in SI/A-life experiments, areas that really interest me.

2. Understanding the idea of colony cognitive maps gives a much better understanding of the inherent self organization in insect swarms and gives a lead to understand self organization in general.

3. The parallel to colony cognitive maps, the cognitive maps follow from cognitive science and brain science. Again areas that really interest me as they hold the key for the REAL artificial intelligence evolution and development in the future.

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The term “Colony Cognitive Map” as i had pointed earlier is in a way a parallel to a Cognitive Map in brain science (i use the term brain science for a combination of fields like neuroscience, Behavioral psychology, cognitive sciences and the likes and will use it in this meaning in this post ) and also that the name is inspired from the same!

There is more than just a romantic resemblance between the self-organization of “simple” neurons into an intelligent brain like structure, producing behaviors well beyond the capabilities of an individual neuron and the self-organization of simple and un-intelligent insects into complex swarms and producing intelligent and very complex and also aesthetically pleasing behavior! I have written previously on such intelligent mass behavior. Consider another example, neurons are known to transmit neurotransmitters in the same way a social insect colony is marked by pheromone deposition and laying.

[Self Organization in Neurons (Left) and a bird swarm(Below).  Photo Credit >> Here and Here]

First let us try to revisit what swarm intelligence roughly is (yes i still am to write a post on a mathematical definition of the same!), Swarm Intelligence is basically a property of a system where the collective actions of unsophisticated agents, acting locally causes functional and sophisticated global patterns to emerge. Swarm intelligence gives a scheme to explore decentralized problem solving. An example that is also one of my favorites is that of a bird swarm, wherein the collective behaviors of birds each of which is very simple causes very complex global patterns to emerge. Over which I have written previously, don’t forget to look at the beautiful video there if you have not done so already!

Self Organization in the Brain: Over the last two months or so i had been reading Douglas Hofstadter’s magnum opus, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (GEB). This great book makes a reference to the self organization in the brain and its comparison with the behavior of the ant colonies and the self organization in them as early as 1979.

[Photo Source: Wikipedia Commons]

A brain is often regarded as one of the most if not the most complex entity. However if we look at a rock it is very complex too, but then what makes a brain so special? What distinguishes the brain from something like a rock is the purposeful arrangement of all the elements in it. The massive parallelism and self organization that is observed in it too amongst other things makes it special. Research in Cybernetics in the 1950s and 1960s lead the “cyberneticians” to try to explain the complex reactions and actions of the brain without any external instruction in terms of self organization. Out of these investigations the idea of neural networks grew out (1943 – ), which are basically very simplified models of how neurons interact in our brains. Unlike the conventional approaches in AI there is no centralized control over a neural network. All the neurons are connected to each other in some way or the other but just like the case in an ant colony none is in control. However together they make possible very complex behaviors. Each neuron works on a simple principle. And combinations of many neurons can lead to complex behavior, an example believed to be due to self-organization. In order to help the animal survive in the environment the brain should be in tune with it too. One way the brain does it is by constantly learning and making predictions on that basis. Which means a constant change and evolution of connections.

Cognitive Maps: The concept of space and how humans perceive it has been a topic that has undergone a lot of discussion in academia and philosophy. A cognitive map is often called a mental map, a mind map, cognitive model etc.

The origin of the term Cognitive Map is largely attributed to Edward Chace Tolman, here cognition refers to mental models that people use to perceive, understand and react to seemingly complex information. To understand what a mental model means it would be favorable to consider an example I came across on wikipedia on the same. A mental model is an inherent explanation in somebody’s thought process on how something works in the spatial or external world in general. It is hypothesized that once a mental model for something or some representation is formed in the brain it can replace careful analysis and careful decision making to reduce the cognitive load. Coming back to the example consider a mental model in a person of perceiving the snake as dangerous. A person who holds this model will likely rapidly retreat as if is like a reflex without initial conscious logical analysis. And somebody who does not hold such a model might not react in the same way.

Extending this idea we can look at cognitive maps as a method to structure, organize and store spatial information in the brain which can reduce the cognitive load using mental models and and enhance quick learning and recall of information.

In a new locality for example, human way-finding involves recognition and appreciation of common representations of information such as maps, signs and images so to say. The human brain tries to integrate and connect this information into a representation which is consistent with the environment and is a sort of a “map”. Such spatial (not necessarily spatial) internal representations formed in the brain can be called a cognitive map. As the familiarity of a person with an area increases then the reliance on these external representations of information gradually reduces. And the common landmarks become a tool to localize within a cognitive map.

Cognitive maps store conscious perceptions of the sense of position and direction and also the subconscious automatic interconnections formed as a result of acquiring spatial information while traveling through the environment. Thus they (cognitive maps) help to determine the position of a person, the positioning of objects and places and the idea of how to get from one place unto another. Thus a cognitive map may also be said to be an internal cognitive collage.

Though metaphorically similar the idea of a cognitive map is not really similar to a cartographic map.

Colony Cognitive Maps: With the above general background it would be much easier to think of a colony cognitive map. As it is basically a analogy to the above. As described in my post on adaptive routing, social insects such as ants construct trails and networks of regular traffic via a process of pheromone deposition, positive feedback and amplification by the trail following. These are very similar to cognitive maps. However one obvious difference lies in the fact that cognitive maps lie inside the brain and social insects such as ants write their spatial memories in the external environment.

Let us try to picture this in terms of ants, i HAVE written about how a colony cognitive map is formed in this post without mentioning the term.

A rather indispensable aspect of such mass communication as in insect swarms is Stigmergy. Stigmergy refers to communication indirectly, by using markers such as pheromones in ants. Two distinct types of stigmergy are observed. One is called sematectonic stigmergy, it involves a change in the physical environment characteristics.An example of sematectonic stigmergy is nest building wherein an ant observes a structure developing and adds its ball of mud to the top of it. Another form of stigmergy is sign-based and hence indirect. Here something is deposited in the environment that makes no direct contribution to the task being undertaken but is used to influence the subsequent behavior that is task related. Sign based stigmergy is very highly developed in ants. Ants use chemicals called as pheromones to develop a very sophisticated signaling system. Ants foraging for food lay down some pheromone which marks the path that they follow. An isolated ant moves at random but an ant encountering a previously laid trail will detect it and decide to follow it with a high probability and thereby reinforce it with a further quantity of pheromone. Since the pheromone will evaporate the lesser used paths will gradually vanish. We see that this is a collective behavior.

Now we assume that in an environment the actors (say for example ants) emit pheromone at a set rate. Also there is a constant rate at which the pheromone evaporates. We also assume that the ants themselves have no memory of previous paths taken and act ONLY on the basis of the local interactions with pheromone concentrations in the vicinity. Now if we consider the “field” or “map” that is the overall result and formed in the environment as a result of the movements of the individual ants over a fixed period of time. Then this “pheromonal” field contains information about past movements and decisions of the individual ants.

The pheromonal field (cognitive map) as i just mentioned contains information about past movements and decisions of the organisms, but not arbitrarily far in the past since the field “forgets” its distant history due to evaporation in time. Now this is exactly a parallel to a cognitive map, with the difference that for a colony the spatial information is written in the environment unlike inside the brain in the case of a human cognitive map. Another major similarity is that neurons release a number of neurotransmitters which can be considered to  be a parallel to the pheromones released as described above! The similarities are striking!

Now if i look back at the post on swarm paintings, then we can see that the we can make such paintings, with the help of a swarm of robots. More pheromone concentration on a path means more paint. And hence the painting is NOT random but is EMERGENT. I hope i could make the idea clear.

How Swarms Build Colony Cognitive Maps: Now it would be worthwhile to look at a simple model of how ants construct cognitive maps, that I read about in a wonderful paper by Mark Millonas and Dante Chialvo. Though i have already mentioned, I’ll still sum up the basic assumptions.

Assumptions:

1. The individual agent (or ant) is memoryless.

2. There is no direct communication between the organisms.

3. There is no spatial diffusion of the pheromone deposited. It remains fixed at a point where it was deposited.

4. Each agent emits pheromone at a constant rate say .

Stochastic Transition Probabilities:

Now the state of each agent can be described by a phase variable which contains its position and orientation . Since the response at any given time is dependent solely on the present and not the previous history, it would be sufficient to specify the transition probability from one location to another place and orientation an instant later. Thus the movement of each individual agent can be considered roughly to be a continuous markov process whose probabilities at each and every instance of time are decided by the pheromone concentration .

By using theoretical considerations, generalizations from observations in ant colonies the response function can be effectively summed up into a two parameter pheromone weight function.

This weight function measures the relative probabilities in moving to a site with the pheromone density .

Another parameter may be considered. This parameter measures the degree of randomness by which an agent can follow a pheromone trail. For low values of the pheromone concentration does not largely impact its choice but higher values do.

At this point we can define another factor . This signifies the sensory capability. It describes the fact that the ants ability to sense pheromone decreases somewhat at higher concentrations. Something like a saturation scenario.

Pheromone Evolution: It is essential to describe how the pheromone evolves. According to an assumption already made, each agent emits pheromone at a constant rate with no spatial diffusion. If the pheromone at a location is not replenished then it will gradually evaporate. The pheromonal field so formed does contain a memory of the past movements of the agents in space, however because of the evaporation process it does not have a very distant memory.

Analysis: Another important parameter is the regarding the number of ants present, the density of ants . Thus using all these parameters we can define a single parameter, the average pheromonal field . Where is what i mentioned above, the rate of scent decay.

Further detailed analysis can be studied out here. With the above background it is just a matter of understanding.

[Evolution of distribution of ants : Source]

Click to Enlarge

Now after continuing with the mathematical analysis in the hyperlink above, we fix the values of the parameters.

Then a large number of ants are placed at random positions, the movement of each ant is determined by the probability .

Another assumption is that the pheromone density at each point at is zero. Each ant deposits pheromone at a decided rate and also the pheromone evaporates at a fixed rate .

In the above beautiful picture we the evolution of a distribution of ants on a 32×32 lattice. A pattern begins to emerge as early as the 100th time step. Weak pheromonal paths are completely evaporated and we finally get a emergent ant distribution pattern as shown in the final image.

The Conclusion that Chialvo and Millonas note is that scent following of the very fundamental type described above (assumptions) is sufficient to produce an evolution (emergence) of complex pattern of organized flow of social insect traffic all by itself. Detailed conclusion can be read in this wonderful paper!

References and Suggested for Further Reading:

1. Cognitive Maps, click here >>

2. Remembrance of places past: A History of Theories of Space. click here >>

3. The Science of Self Organization and Adaptivity, Francis Heylighen, Free University of Brussels, Belgium. Click here >>

4.   The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, John O’ Keefe and Lynn Nadel, Clarendon Press, Oxford. To access the pdf version of this book click here >>

5. The Self-Organization in the Brain, Christoph von der Malsburg, Depts for Computer Science, Biology and Physics, University of Southern California.

5. How Swarms Build Cognitive Maps, Dante R. Chialvo and Mark M. Millonas, The Santa Fe Institute of Complexity. Click here >>

6. Social Cognitive Maps, Swarm Collective Perception and Distributed Search on Dynamic Landscapes, Vitorino Ramos, Carlos Fernandes, Agostinho C. Rosa.

Related Posts:

1. Swarm Paintings: Non-Human Art

2. The Working of a Bird Swarm

3. Adaptive Routing taking Cues from Stigmergy in Ants

Possibly Related:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey

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Swarm Paintings: Non-Human Art

General Background: Since childhood i have enjoyed sketching and painting, and very much at that! Sometimes i found myself copying an existing image or painting, making small changes here and there in it. Yes, the paintings came out beautiful (or so i think!), but one thing always made me unhappy, i thought that the creativity needed to make original stuff was missing at times (not always). It was not there all the time. It came in bursts and went away.

I agree with Leonel Moura (from his article) that creativity is basically produced due to different experiences and interactions. Absence or lack of which could make art lose novelty.

Talking of novelty, how about looking at art in nature? Richard Dawkins states that the difference between human art or design and the amazingly “ingenious” forms that we encounter in nature, is due tho the fact that Human art originates in the mind , while the natural designs result from natural selection. Which is very true. However it is another matter that natural selection and cultural selection, that will ultimately decide on the “popularity” of an art don’t function in the same way. Anyhow How can we remove the cultural bias or the human bias that we have in our art forms?

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Answers in Artificial Life: Artificial life may be defined as “A field of study devoted to understanding life by attempting to derive general theories underlying biological phenomena, and recreating these dynamics in other physical media – such as computers – making them accessible to new kinds of experimental manipulation and testing. This scientific research links biology and computer science.”

Most of the A-Life simulations today can not be considered truly alive, as they still can not show some properties of truly alive systems and also that they have considerable human bias in design. However there are two views that have existed on the whole idea of Artificial Life and the extent it can go.

Weak A-Life is the idea that the “living process” can not be achieved beyond a chemical domain. Weak A-life researchers concentrate on simulating life processes with an underlying aim to understand the biological processes.

Strong A-Life is exactly the reverse. John Von Neumann once remarked “life is a process which can be abstracted away from any particular medium“. In recent times Ecologist Tom Ray declared that his computer simulation Tierra was not a simulation of life but a synthesis of life. In Tierra, computer programmes compete for CPU time and access to the main memory. These programs are also evolvable, can replicate, mutate and recombine.

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Relating A-Life to Art: While researching on these ideas and the fact that these could be used to generate the art forms that i talked about in the first paragraph i came across a few papers by Swarm Intelligence Guru Vitorino Ramos and a couple of articles by Leonel Moura who had worked in collaboration with Dr Ramos on precisly this theme.

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Swarm Paintings: Thus the idea as i had mentioned in my very first paragraph is to create an organism ideally with minimum pre-commitment to any representational art scheme or human style or taste. Sounds simple but is not so simple to implement!

There are a number of projects that have dealt with creating art, but these mostly have been evolutionary algorithms that learn from human behavior, and learn about human mannerisms and try to create art according to that. The idea here is to create art with a minimum of human intervention.

I came across a project by Dr Vitorino Ramos to which i had pointed out implicitly in the last paragraph. This project called ARTSBOT (ARTistic Swarm roBOTs) project. This project tries to address this issue of minimizing the human intervention in aesthetics , ethnicity, taste,style etc. In short their idea was to remove or to minimize the anthropocentric bias that pervades all our art forms. Obviously all this can have massive implications in our understanding of the biological processes also, however here we’ll talk of only art.

Two of the first paintings that emerged were:

(Source: Here)

(Source: Here)

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These paintings were among the first swarm paintings by Leonel Moura and Vitorino Ramos. Now we see that these seem detached from a functional human pre-commitment. They don’t seem to represent any emotion or style or taste. However they still look very pleasant!

However the point to be understood and to be noted is that these are NOT random pictures created either by a programme or by a swarm of robots moving “randomly”. These pictures were generated by a horde of artificial ants and also by robots. They are not random, but they EMERGE from a process of pheromone deposition and evaporation as was simulated in this system from ants. Thus the result that we have above is a Colony Cognitive Map. The colony cognitive map is analogous to a cognitive map in the brain. I will cover the idea of a colony cognitive map in the next post.

A couple of more beautiful paintings can be seen below!

(Source for both images : Here>>)

Though i have already mentioned how these art forms emerge, i would still like to quote a paragraph from here:

The painting robots are artificial ‘organisms’ able to create their own art forms. They are equipped with environmental awareness and a small brain that runs algorithms based on simple rules. The resulting paintings are not predetermined, emerging rather from the combined effects of randomness and stigmergy, that is, indirect communication trough the environment.
Although the robots are autonomous they depend on a symbiotic relationship with human partners Not only in terms of starting and ending the procedure, but also and more deeply in the fact that the final configuration of each painting is the result of a certain gestalt fired in the brain of the human viewer. Therefore what we can consider ‘art’ here, is the result of multiple agents, some human, some artificial, immerged in a chaotic process where no one is in control and whose output is impossible to determine.
Hence, a ‘new kind of art’ represents the introduction of the complexity paradigm in the cultural and artistic realm.’

A Painting bot is something like in the picture shown below:

A swarm of robots at work:

The final art generated by the swarm of these robots is beautiful!

(Photo Credit for the three pictures above: Here>>

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Conclusions:

The work of Dr Ramos and Leonel Maura can be summed up as:

1. The human is only the “art-architect”, the “swarm” is the artist.

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2. The “life” of Artificial Life shows characteristics like natural life itself namely Morphogenesis, ability to adapt to changing environments, evolution etc.

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Leonel Moura’s wonderful article states that the final aim is to create an “Artificial Autopoietic System”, intriguing indeed and eagerly awaited!!
Such simulations could change the way we understand the biological processes and life.

Also i am now thinking how could music be produced based on the same or similar ideas. I wonder if Swarm music could be available. It would be most interesting and i can’t wait to listen to it already!

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Have a look at this video by Leonel Moura, having some time lapse footage of robots painting.

References:

1. Ant- Swarm Morphogenese By Leonel Moura

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2. On the Implicit and on the Artificial – Morphogenesis and Emergent Aesthetics in Autonomous Collective Systems, in ARCHITOPIA Book, Art, Architecture and Science, INSTITUT D’ART CONTEMPORAIN, J.L. Maubant et al. (Eds.), pp. 25-57, Chapter 2, Vitorino Ramos.

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3. A Strange Metamorphosis [From Kafka to Red Ant], Vitorino Ramos

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Links:

Follow the following links to follow on more exciting papers and paintings.

1. Dr Vitorino Ramos

2. Leonel Moura

Onionesque Reality Home >>

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