This week, Memming and I are in Columbus, Ohio for a workshop on “Sensory and Coding”, organized by Brent Doiron, Adrienne Fairhall, David Kleinfeld, and John Rinzel.
Monday was “Big Picture Day”, and I gave a talk about Bayesian Efficient Coding, which represents our attempt to put Barlow’s Efficient Coding Hypothesis in a Bayesian framework, with an explicit loss function to specify what kinds of posteriors are “good”. One of my take-home bullet points was that “you can’t get around the problem of specifying a loss function”, and entropy is no less arbitrary than other choice. This has led to some stimulating lunchtime discussions with Elad Schneidman, Surya Ganguli, Stephanie Palmer, David Schwab, and Memming over whether entropy really is special (or not!).
It’s been a great workshop so far, with exciting talks from a panoply of heavy hitters, including Garrett Stanley, Steve Baccus, Fabrizio Gabbiani, Tanya Sharpee, Nathan Kutz, Adam Kohn, and Anitha Pasupathy. You can see the full lineup here:
http://mbi.osu.edu/2012/ws6schedule.html
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