Books

STYLE
Reader: Your Name Here
Citation: A.N. Author (year), book title, City: Publisher.
Description: 1-2 sentences about why you have chosen to read this book.

BOOKS: CN710 FALL 2007

Reader: Hee Kyoung Ko
Citation: A. Barabasi (2003), Linked: How everything is connected to everything else and what it means., New York: Plume.
Description: This book provides how networks increase and evolve in the complex real world. The author introduces the self-organized and scale free network model. This recently advanced network model can predict the future as well as be applied to in the internet, web, science, nature, business, and social networks.

Reader: Hee Kyoung Ko
Citation: Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking., New York: Time Warner.
Description: Sometimes we have to make decisions quickly. This author introduces how we can make better decisions in basis of the involuntarily grasped information in a moment by the blink of an eye in our life.

Reader: Jesse Palma
Citation: Izhikevich, E.M. (2007). Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience: The Geometry of Excitability and Bursting, The MIT Press.
Description: This book describes modeling and analysis of individual neuron dynamics via a simplified version of the Hodgkin-Huxley equations, similar to the FitzHugh-Nagumo equations. Izhikevich’s model boasts a variety of tonic and bursting behavior and the ability to simulate networks with sizes at the order of the human brain. His research is closely related to my own interests, and he is a student-invited speaker for a CNS colloquium later in the semester.

Reader: Karthik Srinivasan
Citation: Robert Kanigel,(1992). The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan,paperback Washington Square Press
Description: A moving and astonishing biography of the improbable story of Srinavasa Ramanujan Iyengar, self-taught mathematical prodigy. In 1913 Ramanujan, an young Indian clerk who had flunked out of two colleges, wrote a letter filled with startlingly original theorems to the English mathematician G. H. Hardy. Struck by the Indian's genius, Hardy brought Ramanujan to England. Gives nontechnical readers the flavor of how Ramanujan arrived at his mathematical ideas, which are used today in everything from cosmology to computer science. Choose this book, as mathematical tales inspir me the most as well as bring the best out of me. A movie is also being planned based on this biography.[New York Times Notable Book of the Year]

Reader: Karthik Srinivasan
Citation: Sigmund Freud, (1911). The Interpretation of Dreams, paperback Mass Market Process
Description: The first ever book on psycho-analysis,the field fostered by Freud. Introduces Freudian Psychology and his analysis of Dreams. Essentially argues Dreams as Wish-Fulfillment. Considered as one of the major inroads in the developments of Psychology which further motivated people like Carl Jung. The book was chosen for its intense treatment of dreams in a firm psychological setting. Real Eye-Opener and helps in my perception of different things.
Reader: Neel Kishan
Citation: John Anderson (2007). How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe?, hardcover Oxford University Press
Description: This book contains the most recent description of the ACT-R production system by its principle contributor. Anderson argues that humans share the same basic cognitive architecture, which consists of several largely independent modules. Here Anderson reviews the recent literature and shows the associations of these modules with different brain regions. Several studies of how the ACT-R system models behaviors such as driving a car and solving an algebraic equation are also presented.

Reader: Neel Kishan
Citation: Daniel L. Shacter (2001). The Seven Sins of Memory, paperback Houghton Mifflin
Description: This book describe the fundamental flaws of human memory and how these flaws can be considered virtues. Examples are taken from everyday life to show situations of absent-mindedness, transience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Schacter also relates these psychological phenomena to the neurology of memory.

Reader: Ignacio Melendez-Pastor
Citation: Tom M. Mitchel (1997). Machine learning, hardcover McGraw-Hill Series in Computer Science
Description: The textbook provides a single source introduction to the primary approaches to machine learning. It is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well for developers and researchers in the field. No prior background in artificial intelligence or statistics is assumed.

Reader: Bo (Cloud) Cao
Citation: Data mining (2nd edition) by Ian H. Witten and Eibe Frank, Data mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (2nd edition), Morgan Kaufmann June 2005 525 pages Paper ISBN 0-12-088407-0
Description: To see what the problem is and why and how to approach it. Some easy-to-understand examples in the whole book help to provide a relative straightforward view of the problem and the algorithms.

BOOKS: CN710 SPRING 2006

Reader: Greg Amis
Citation: A. Barabasi (2003), Linked: How everything is connected to everything else and what it means., New York: Plume.
Description: Linked provides an entertaining review of recent advances of network theory and its application to real world problems and systems. Much of it focuses on so-called “scale free” networks and the fact that many networks (the Internet, scholarly citations, Hollywood) appear to follow this topology.

Reader: Greg Amis
Citation: James Surowiecki (2004) The wisdom of crowds., Doubleday
Description:

Reader: Chaitanya Sai Gaddam
Citation:David J. C. Mackay (2002), Information theory, inference and learning algorithms, Cambridge University Press
Description: The author draws comparisons between information theory and machine learning and makes a case for learning machine learning within the framework of information theory.From the preface: Why unify information theory and machine learning? Because they are two sides of the same coin. In the 1960s, a single field, cybernetics, was populated by information theorists, computer scientists, and neuroscientists, all studying common problems. Information theory and machine learning still belong together. Brains are the ultimate compression and communication systems. And the state-of-the-art algorithms for both data compression and error-correcting codes use the same tools as machine learning.

Reader: Chaitanya Sai Gaddam
Citation: Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Michnik Golinkoff (1999), The Origins of Grammar: Evidence from Early Language Comprehension, The MIT Press
Description: The book starts off discussing the popular theories of language comprehension and introduces the Coalition Model as an alternative that eschews the dichotomies and hyperbole of the earlier theories. A large part of the book is devoted to a few experiments performed according to intermodal preferential looking paradigm that is now very popular in cognitive assessment of very young kids. It is worth comparing the acquisition of language in babies to the learning process in classifiers to understand the stages in which comprehension develops.

Reader: Chaitanya Sai Gaddam
Citation: Peter W. Jusczyk The Discovery of Spoken Language, The MIT Press
Description:This book is also about the acquisition of the language faculty in kids, but the emphasis is on the development of speech perception and how the discrimination of human speech sounds develops very early on.

Reader: Arun Ravindran
Citation: Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink, Back Bay Books, 2002.
Description:“It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.”-Gladwell.

Reader: Arun Ravindran
Citation: T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, and J. Friedman The Elements of Statistical Learning. Springer-Verlag, 2001.
Description: Describes important statistical ideas in machine learning, data mining, and bioinformatics. Covers a broad range, from supervised learning (prediction), to unsupervised learning, including classification trees, neural networks, and support vector machines. Chapter 12 introduces neural networks from a statistician's perspective.

Reader: Eugene Zaydens
Citation: Bryan M. Turner Chromatin and Gene Regulation. Blackwell Science, 2001.
Description: This book discusses the structure of chromatin, which is a fundamental component in the network of controls that regulates gene expression. In addition, it elaborates on how interdependece of enzyme, DNA, and chromatin influences gene regulation and, therefore, methods that are employed in research in this area. The book also links disruption of these control processes by genetic or environmental factors to human deseases.

BOOKS: CN710 FALL 2006

Reader: Gennady Livitz
Citation: His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem translated from Polish by Michael Kandel

Reader: Angela Chapman
Citation: Matter and Memory, by Henri Bergson (Trans. by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer), 1912

Reader: Rich Ivey
Citation: Reason, J. (1990). Human Error. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Reader: Rich Ivey
Citation: Dörner, D. (1996), The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Reader: Matt Silver
Citation: Drug Action in the Central Nervous System by Paul M. Carvey.

Reader: Chris Peck
Citation: Surowiecki, James (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor Books.

Reader: Chris Peck
Citation: Gladwell, Malcolm (2005). Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Company

Reader: Sohrob Kazerounian
Citation: Tomasello, Michael (2003). Constructing a Language: A Usage Based Theory of Language Acquisitionf. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Reader: Bret Fortenberry
Citation: Surowiecki, James (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor Books.
A write up on emergent behavior in humans
References and videos that contributed to the write up

Reader: Nicholas Foley
Citation: E.T Jaynes. Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. Cambridge University Press, January 2003.

Reader: Andrew Browning
Citation: Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Little, Brown & Company.

Reader: Andrew Browning
Citation: LeGault, M. R. (2006). Think: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye. Threshold Editions.