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Preface

Joseph Sirosh gif, Risto Miikkulainen, and Yoonsuck Choe
Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712
sirosh,risto,yschoe@cs.utexas.edu

This book grew out of the NIPS post-conference workshop "Computational Roles of Lateral Connections in the Cortex," organized on 12/2/1994 in Vail, Colorado, by Joseph Sirosh and Risto Miikkulainen. At the workshop Gary Blasdel, Terry Sejnowski, Jack Cowan, Dawei Dong, Shimon Edelman, Jonathan Marshall, DeLiang Wang, and Joseph Sirosh presented their work, and the idea of publishing the workshop talks electronically was started. Several other contributions were solicited from people unable to attend the workshop, and the present set of chapters was finalized in the summer of 1995. The final job of converting the chapters to a coherent html format was done by Yoonsuck Choe during the following fall and winter. The publication date of the book is May 1996, when announcements were made on various electronic email lists.

Although an electronic publication such as this book could in principle evolve over time, we do not intend to do so in this case. The idea is that this book is just like any other book, except that it is electronic. It has an ISBN number (0-9647060-0-8), and its contents do not change. It can be cited like any other book, like this:

Sirosh, J., Miikkulainen, R., and Choe, Y., editors, Lateral Interactions in the Cortex: Structure and Function. The UTCS Neural Networks Research Group, Austin, TX, 1996. Electronic book, ISBN 0-9647060-0-8, http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/nn/web-pubs/htmlbook96.

Chapters in the book should be cited like this:
Sirosh, J., Miikkulainen, R., and Bednar, J. A., Self-Organization of Orientation Maps, Lateral Connections, and Dynamic Receptive Fields in the Primary Visual Cortex. In Sirosh, J., Miikkulainen, R., and Choe, Y., editors, Lateral Interactions in the Cortex: Structure and Function. The UTCS Neural Networks Research Group, Austin, TX, 1996. Electronic book, ISBN 0-9647060-0-8, http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/nn/web-pubs/htmlbook96.

Most of the chapters in this book were originally submitted as LaTeX files, and therefore exist in postscript versions. We do not have any postscript available at this site, however, because the idea is that the book is entirely electronic and makes use of hyperlinks, movies, color, etc. which would not be reproducible on paper. If you want to get paper copies of the chapters, you can print them from your Web browser, or you could contact the authors directly for copies.

The equations and figures in the book were generated for a line width of 715 pixels, so you should make your browser window at least that wide when reading the book. Also, make sure the "image auto-load" preference is turned on in your browser so that you get to see the equations and figures immediately without having to click on each one of them, and that you have an mpeg_play program in your path so that you can see the movies. On some displays, some of the figures look better with the "image dithering" preference turned on, although usually it is not necessary.

In addition to the primary site at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/nn/web-pubs/htmlbook96, the book is mirrored at http://eris.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~edelman/htmlbook96/ (thanks to Shimon Edelman for providing this site). You should try the site closest to you first. The network connections may sometimes be very slow and reading the electronic book over the internet somewhat frustrating. For this reason, we have prepared a tar file (and its gzipped version) of the entire book that can be downloaded and installed at your local site. The tar file is 8.1MB (5.3MB gzipped), so it takes a while to transmit over the net, but having a local copy may make reading the book easier, and in the end, reduce network congestion. You can get the tar file from either site.

The copyright of the chapters in this book remains with the individual authors. You can download any part of it for your own use, but you are not permitted to use it in any publications without permission from the authors. Also, please do not put up another copy of it on the internet without talking to the editors first. However, if you find the book useful, feel free to add a link to it from your own "WWW Resources" page so that other people can find it too.

This project was supported in part by National Science Foundation under grant #IRI-9309273. The chapters were converted from LaTeX to HTML using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 95.1 (Fri Jan 20 1995) Copyright © 1993, 1994, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds. Computing facilities for the project were provided by the Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin.

Austin, TX, May 1996
Joseph Sirosh, Risto Miikkulainen, and Yoonsuck Choe


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Up: Lateral Interactions in the Cortex: Structure and Function