Alex Bäcker's Publications

 

Thesis
Papers
Conference Abstracts
Patents
Code
Math & Science Explanations
Talks
Ideas
Op-Eds and Letters to the Editor
Travel Stories
Buying Guides
Public service


See also Research Interests for a thematic organization.

Unless prohibited by the respective journal, any of the documents linked below may be reproduced freely as long as proper citation (Alex Bäcker: Title of the document, www.its.caltech.edu/~alex/pub.html) is provided. These are open-access articles distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


Thesis

Bäcker, A. (2002)
Pattern recognition in locust early olfactory circuits: Priming, gain control and coding issues. Individual chapters by topic.



Papers

Evolution:
Bäcker, A. (1999)
Mutator Genes and Natural Selection: On Richard Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable

Flow Cytometry:
Bäcker, A. (2001) A Simple Formula to Accurately Subtract Positivity of Cytometric Negative Controls.

History of Science and Scientometrics:
Bäcker, A. (2004) Growth and democratization of science. 4th International Conference on University Evaluation and Research Evaluation.
Boyack, K. & Bäcker, A. (2004) The Growth and Memory of Science. Submitted.
Bäcker, A. (2004). A Future for Scientific Discourse. Submitted
Boyack, K. & Bäcker, A. (2003) The Memory of Science. 9th International Conference of the Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics.

Human-Machine Interfaces:
Bäcker, A. & Peral, E. (1997) A remote video eye tracker. Caltech CNS/EE 148 Technical Report, 1997.

Data mining, Learning and Self-Organization:
Martin, S. & Bäcker, A. (2005) Estimating manifold dimension by inversion error. 20th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing.
Hipp, J. & Bäcker, A. (2004). An activity-dependent model of the nose to brain mapping. Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting.
Zhigulin, V. and Bäcker, A. (2002) Self-organization of neural networks into winnerless competition: A local learning rule achieves antisymmetric co-regulation of distant synapses

Statistics:
Bäcker, A. (2002) The probability that a single underlying binomial distribution yields two given success proportions: A hypothesis test
Bäcker, A. (2002) Fractional K-nearest neighbors: Dealing with nonuniform sampling
Bäcker, A. and Cassenaer, S. (2002) Asymmetric sliding-window cross-correlation

Neural Coding:
Brown, W.M. and Bäcker, A. (2006) Optimal Neuronal Tuning for a Finite Stimulus Space. Neural Computation.
Bäcker, A. (2002) The information content of neurons engaged in population temporal coding in early olfactory circuits
Bäcker, A. (2002) The role of synchronization in the decoding of temporal information contained in neuronal assemblies
Bäcker, A. (2002) Multiplexing odor identity and concentration information with a population temporal code
MacLeod, K., Bäcker A., & Laurent, G. (1998) Who reads temporal information contained across synchronized and oscillatory spike trains? Nature 395, 693-698. Abstract - A presentation about this work
Bäcker, A. and Wehr, M. (1997) Response variability is correlated across multiple projection neurons in the antennal lobe of the locust

Olfaction:
Hipp, J. & Bäcker, A. (2004). An activity-dependent model of the nose to brain mapping. Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting.
Bäcker, A. (2002) Olfaction and the Chemical Senses. A Review.
Bäcker, A. (2002) The olfactory system is invariant to volatility
Bäcker, A. (2002) Hedonic valence of odors in the locust, Schistocerca americana
Bäcker, A. (2002) A computerized odor delivery system for arbitrary time-varying concentrations and mixtures
Bäcker, A. (2002) Gain control via a balance of excitation and inhibition in early olfactory circuits
Bäcker, A. (2002) Priming in early olfactory circuits
Bäcker, A. (2002) Odor categorization: Attractors in the representations of odors in the antennal lobe have sharp boundaries
Bäcker, A. (2002) The connectivity between the locust antennal lobes and mushroom bodies: Combinatorics of a representation

Sleep:
Bäcker, A. (1994) To sleep, perchance to dream. The Harvard Brain I: 50-55.

Visual Search:
Bäcker, A. and Peral, E. (1999) Visual search: amnesic or undecided? 1999 Vision Research Conference, Fort Lauderdale, FL.


Reprints available upon request.


Society for Neuroscience Abstracts

SFN '02 (Orlando): GAIN CONTROL AND CONCENTRATION CODING IN THE LOCUST OLFACTORY SYSTEM . A. Bäcker


SFN '00 (New Orleans): NEURONAL PRIMING IN THE LOCUST OLFACTORY SYSTEM . A. Bäcker and G. Laurent


SFN '98 (Los Angeles): DISRUPTION OF NEURONAL SYNCHRONIZATION IMPAIRS RELIABLE RECONSTRUCTION OF ODORS BY BETA LOBE CELLS BUT NOT BY PROJECTION NEURONS OF THE ANTENNAL LOBE OF THE LOCUST. A. Bäcker, K. MacLeod, M. Wehr and G. Laurent


SFN '97 (New Orleans): ANALYSIS OF THE VARIABILITY OF TEMPORAL RESPONSE PATTERNS OF SIMULTANEOUSLY-RECORDED PROJECTION NEURONS IN THE OLFACTORY SYSTEM OF THE LOCUST. A. Bäcker, M. Wehr and G. Laurent

 

Inventions and patents

Queryless search

Query-specific PageRank

Network-based trust evaluation.

System for authentication of electronic communications.

Electronic video window.

Computational Method to Find Interactions between Genes Using Multiple Genomes.

User-specific Adaptive Method to Sort Search Results by Relevance for the World Wide Web and other Interconnected Data Structures.

A Remote Video-based Eye Tracker.

Automatic Methods to build Ontologies.

Method to Automatically Associate a Web Page or Document with an Expression and Summarize Documents.

Method to Direct Users to Relevant Portion of a Web Document.

Treatment and prevention for AIDS.


 

Code

Backer (2002): The probability that a single underlying binomial distribution yields two given success proportions: A hypothesis test without the usual approximations and assumptions. MATLAB codePaper describing algorithm

 

Explanations

Free Will

Election Statistics (Bush vs. Gore, Florida, 2000)

Bäcker, A. (2000) Multiple Comparisons: How to account for multiple measurements or experiments to obtain a proper estimate of statistical significance of your results

Probability of flipping all pancakes with N flips of a pan

Q&A on the Calendar

Q&A on the Earth & Moon

The Twins Paradox & Relativity

 

Talks

The Growth, Memory and Democratization of Science, H+, Caltech, December 5 2010.

The mathematics of understanding: A graph theoretical study of meaning and the self-referential nature of knowledge. Stanford ICME, March 3, 2005.

A Cost-Based Metric to Measure Similarity between Spike Trains.

The Role of Temporal Coding and Synchronization in the Brain

 

Ideas

Campaign Reform & a Proposal for a Political System without Parties

Incentives for Long Term Thinking by Public Officials

Sobre como elegir colaboradores politicos

 

Letters to the Editor of The New York Times

A proposed solution to the UPS crisis: Part-time labor and the proper distribution of wages and benefits (published 1997).

A defense of freedom of speech and meritocracy: Comment on the closedown of the student newspaper at Stuyvesant High School (published 1998).

Right to bear arms, the Second Amendment, responsibility and child crime prevention: A response to Charlton Heston (May 1998).

 

Letters to the Editor of The Los Angeles Times

So-called medical attention (August 2000).

Double standards and preventive warfare? (February 2002)

 

Los Angeles Times Op-Eds

Eppur si riscalda (June 2003)

 

Cartas de Lectores a LA NACION

Periodismo con fuentes (Junio 2001).

 

Articles for The California Tech

Telling a Person from Trash: A Macintosh Computer's Psychological Problem.

 

Other Essays

A day in the life of Washington, D.C.: An encounter with U.S. Marshals, Russian presidential candidate Alexander Lebed and inequality at the U.S. Holocaust Museum

From California to the Spanish Levante and Back in 96 Hours

 

Guides

Buying a House

Buying a car

 

Public Service

  • Información sobre el proceso de ingreso a universidades norteamericanas
  • Battle Bonzi the Evil Monkey.
  • How to get rid of DLRES.EXE and RDVE.EXE.
  • How to get rid of pop-ups caused by WINNET.EXE.
  • ShareYourExperiences.com is a Scam.
  • How to remove CashBack Buddy.
  • Information on the menu tree for the Visa Hotline of the US Embassy in Buenos Aires

     


    © Copyright 1997-2005 Alex Bäcker.



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