Visit and presentation by Prof. Simon Haykin

Professor Simon Haykin was visiting our laboratory last week. Prof. Haykin is the director of the Adaptive Systems Laboratory of McMaster University. Simon is also well known for his books, including "Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Foundation".

Prof. Haykin gave a presentation on "Coherent Independent Component Analysis", related to the work by his student Kevin Kan. The basic setting was related to the question how to model processing of speech. The Coherent ICA is based on Infomax, Imax and copulas. Imax algorithms are based on the idea of maximizing the mutual information between the outputs of different network modules, and are capable of extracting higher-order features from data. Copulas are functions used in statistics for modeling dependencies between random variables. Prof. Haykin showed in his presentation that the model can be useful for solving real problems including source separation and auditory coding.

I had the chance to have an inspiring discussing with Simon on issues related to cognitive systems and agreed on various ways of future collaboration.