Wednesday, December 14, 2005

WHAT'S NEW @ IEEE FOR STUDENTS

VOLUME 7 NUMBER 12 DECEMBER 2005
Read this issue online:
<http://www.ieee.org/products/whats-new/wnstudents/wnstudents1205.xml>

11. RESEARCHERS DEVELOP SURPRISING MATHEMATICAL MODEL -- OF SURPRISE
Two California scientists have created a mathematical theory of surprise based on principles of probability applied to a digital environment and experiments that record eye movements of volunteers. Researchers from the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering and the University of California Irvine Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics developed their theory using the stream of electronic data making up a video image as a proxy for the complex flood of stimuli in a real environment. By analyzing a data stream, the researchers say they can isolate unique visual stimuli, called "salient," "novelty," and "entropy." The researchers say they have worked out a way of predicting how observing new data will affect the set of beliefs an observer has developed about the world on the basis of data previously received. The scientists analyze a video stream to describe its most "surprising," features, then check the analysis by watching the eye movements of observers viewing the images, to see if the movements correlated with the measure of surprise. Read more:
<http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-11/uosc-scs112805.php>

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