Lectures with links to Powerpoint presentations

• On 31 October: Introduction to Connectionism

• On 7 November: Programming Lecture: Programming in Nutshell and Visual Basic.

If you prefer PDF format, take a look at the Practicum Lecture in PDF format (290 kB).

There are many tutorials on Visual Basic (or VBA) online. This one gives a good overview, but also covers much more than we need for this course. If you come accross another good one, let me know and I'll add it here.

• On 14 November: Activations, Attractors, and Associators

During a previous connectionism course one of the students, Jurriaan Schreuder, made a fun Sudoku Solver as a type of extension of the 8-Queens Problem. It is a Hopfield Network to which some noise is added in order to esape from local minima. Usually it finds the solution, not withstanding how difficult the Sudoku is deemed to be (for humans). See for example here for some examples of difficult puzzles. Click the corresponding artificial neurons in the network to 'clamp' the numbers that have been given in the puzzle (they will then turn red).

• On 21 November: Learning Neural Networks: Perceptron and Backpropagation

• On 28 November: Language, Rules, and Serial Processing in Neural Networks

The lecture by Jeff Hinton on Restricted Boltzmann Machines can be found here.

• 5 December:Programming Lecture 2 (only for students who do the lab part)

• On 12 December: Modular Neural Networks: SOM, ART, and CALM

• Self-Organizing Map Color Demo in JavaScript (use Google Chrome for best performance). You can set a temporary lesion by left-clicking on a cell (becomes black at first but recovers) and a permanent one with right-click (stays white; make temporary again by left-clicking). It is interesting to see how a converged map is able to repair a smallish lesion (black spot). A large lesion usually leads to a local reorganization of the map with the massive repair necessary. Use 'white lesions' to see what happens if you isolate areas of the map. It is also possible to turn off one of the color channels. E.g., turning of blue will lead to only red-green based colors to be presented. This is essentially a two-dimensional stimulus and the map should be able to reach an optimal layout, which is not possible with a three-dimensional color stream.

  Jurriaan Schreuder has also written a Color SOM Demo in ActionScript

• 19 December:No lecture

• On 9 January: Connectionism, Evolution, and the Brain

• On 16 January: Connectionist Models of Memory

• 23 January:No lecture

• On 30 January: Exam in Room REC- 1.02 (example of exam)

• The Resit (second chance) at 11 July 2014 will be from 11:00 to 13:00 REC M 3.01 .