Jack L. Gallant

Natalia Y. Bilenko, Jack L. Gallant

Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is a valuable method for interpreting cross-covariance across related datasets of different dimensionality. There are many potential applications of CCA to neuroimaging data analysis. For instance, CCA can be used for finding functional similarities across fMRI datasets collected from multiple subjects without resampling individual datasets to a template anatomy. In this paper, we introduce Pyrcca, an open-source Python module for executing CCA between two or more datasets. Pyrcca can be used to implement CCA with or without regularization, and with or without linear or a Gaussian kernelization of the datasets. We demonstrate an application of CCA implemented with Pyrcca to neuroimaging data analysis. We use CCA to find a data-driven set of functional response patterns that are similar across individual subjects in a natural movie experiment. We then demonstrate how this set of response patterns discovered by CCA can be used to accurately predict subject responses to novel natural movie stimuli.

Polina Golland, Jack Gallant, Greg Hager et al.

The history of computer science and brain sciences are intertwined. In his unfinished manuscript "The Computer and the Brain," von Neumann debates whether or not the brain can be thought of as a computing machine and identifies some of the similarities and differences between natural and artificial computation. Turing, in his 1950 article in Mind, argues that computing devices could ultimately emulate intelligence, leading to his proposed Turing test. Herbert Simon predicted in 1957 that most psychological theories would take the form of a computer program. In 1976, David Marr proposed that the function of the visual system could be abstracted and studied at computational and algorithmic levels that did not depend on the underlying physical substrate. In December 2014, a two-day workshop supported by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (NSF CISE) was convened in Washington, DC, with the goal of bringing together computer scientists and brain researchers to explore these new opportunities and connections, and develop a new, modern dialogue between the two research communities. Specifically, our objectives were: 1. To articulate a conceptual framework for research at the interface of brain sciences and computing and to identify key problems in this interface, presented in a way that will attract both CISE and brain researchers into this space. 2. To inform and excite researchers within the CISE research community about brain research opportunities and to identify and explain strategic roles they can play in advancing this initiative. 3. To develop new connections, conversations and collaborations between brain sciences and CISE researchers that will lead to highly relevant and competitive proposals, high-impact research, and influential publications.

Pulkit Agrawal, Dustin Stansbury, Jitendra Malik et al.

The human brain is adept at solving difficult high-level visual processing problems such as image interpretation and object recognition in natural scenes. Over the past few years neuroscientists have made remarkable progress in understanding how the human brain represents categories of objects and actions in natural scenes. However, all current models of high-level human vision operate on hand annotated images in which the objects and actions have been assigned semantic tags by a human operator. No current models can account for high-level visual function directly in terms of low-level visual input (i.e., pixels). To overcome this fundamental limitation we sought to develop a new class of models that can predict human brain activity directly from low-level visual input (i.e., pixels). We explored two classes of models drawn from computer vision and machine learning. The first class of models was based on Fisher Vectors (FV) and the second was based on Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets). We find that both classes of models accurately predict brain activity in high-level visual areas, directly from pixels and without the need for any semantic tags or hand annotation of images. This is the first time that such a mapping has been obtained. The fit models provide a new platform for exploring the functional principles of human vision, and they show that modern methods of computer vision and machine learning provide important tools for characterizing brain function.