Greetings from
NeuroDimension!
Makers of NeuroSolutions,
the Neural Network Simulation Environment.
Happy Neuro Year! This issue of the newsletter highlights our new interactive book, Neural and Adaptive Systems: Fundamentals Through Simulations, including special versioning information for users of NeuroSolutions.
In this issue you’ll find:
* Now Shipping: Neural and Adaptive Systems: Fundamentals Through Simulations
Designing Neural
Networks
* Adaptive Filters
NeuroSolutions Tip
Box
* Interactive Book Users – Which Version of NeuroSolutions to Use
Note: You are receiving this newsletter because you requested to stay informed concerning new developments at NeuroDimension. If you would like to stop receiving these newsletters, please see the bottom of this newsletter for removal instructions.
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What’s News?
Our interactive neural network book, Neural and Adaptive Systems: Fundamentals Through Simulations is now available and shipping. The physical book, published by John Wiley & Sons, contains over 650 pages of text and examples. The interactive version, included on CD-ROM with the book, uses NeuroSolutions directly to actively demonstrate neural and adaptive systems using over 200 interactive examples.
Comments on the book have included: “Very good concept, can't get enough!”, “This has got to be the best textbook I have come across! The amount of thought and care in producing this book is phenomenal.”, “It's a book worth reading. It makes the rather complex theory understandable.”, and “An excellent contribution and a new dimension for workers in this field.”
The book is $79 (plus shipping) and it is available directly from our web site.
For more information and samples of the interactive book, please visit our web site at: http://www.nd.com/products/nsbook.htm
To view the html version of chapter one, please visit:
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Did you know that NeuroSolutions can be used to implement adaptive filters? Adaptive filters are a subset of digital filters, which are a digital signal processing technique used to alter the characteristics of a signal. Typically, digital filters are linear and are designed using a specification and cookbook approach. On the other hand, adaptive filters are filters that can be designed through training (like in neural networks) and can also adapt while in use.
The most common adaptive filter is called the adaptive linear combiner. This is simply a tap delay line followed by a synapse and a linear axon. You can build this simple adaptive filter quickly and easily using the Neural Wizard by specifying a time lagged recurrent network (TLRN) with 0 hidden layers and a linear axon in the output layer.
Adaptive filters can be used for many interesting applications, including optimal filter design, prediction, modeling, interference canceling, noise cancellation, echo cancellation, inverse control, etc. The advantage of adaptive filters is that they can adjust to the changing characteristics of the system. Instead of training and fixing the weights, you allow the weights to adapt while in use, creating a system that can adapt to the changing conditions in its environment.
In addition to adaptive linear combiners, NeuroSolutions allows you to easily create more complex adaptive filters including gamma filters that use a gamma memory element instead of a tap delay line. Adaptive filters can also be made nonlinear. Using a TLRN with nonlinear hidden layers that adapt during operation would be an adaptive nonlinear filter.
For more information about adaptive filters, we encourage you to see the new interactive book. It contains an entire chapter on adaptive filters with many very interesting examples, including all of the applications listed above.
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As mentioned above, the new interactive book is now available for purchase. For those who have purchased or plan to purchase this book, it is important to know which version of NeuroSolutions you will need to install.
If you received either an evaluation copy of NeuroSolutions in the mail or if you purchased a licensed copy of NeuroSolutions, the version of NeuroSolutions on this CD is v3.020. The CD that ships with the interactive book contains a slightly newer release of NeuroSolutions, v3.021. The examples included with the book require v3.021 or higher. The web site contains an upgrade patch for v3.022 (http://www.nd.com/support/302_patch.htm). This patch contains only a few minor bug fixes and most users will find the upgrade to be unnecessary.
Whether you have purchased a licensed copy of NeuroSolutions or not, you will want to install the version of NeuroSolutions that is included with the book (v3.021), unless you already have NeuroSolutions v3.022 installed. If you have NeuroSolutions v3.020 or older installed, the installation program will prompt you to uninstall the older version of NeuroSolutions first (this is recommended). If you are unsure of the version number of your NeuroSolutions installation, select "About NeuroSolutions" from the Help menu.
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Customer Feedback Request
For those of you not familiar with the Custom Solution Wizard, it is an add-on product for NeuroSolutions that allows you to automatically create and compile a dynamic link library (DLL) for virtually any neural network that can be designed within NeuroSolutions. These DLLs respond to a simple protocol that makes it very easy to embed a neural network model into your own application. Currently, the programming tools that can be used with Custom Solution Wizard DLLs include: Visual Basic, Visual C++, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Access.
We are now considering enhancing the Custom Solution Wizard such that the resulting neural network DLLs (or source code depending on the platform) can be run on the server side for use in internet-based applications. We have some preliminary ideas on this and would like your feedback. First, we would like to gauge what the interest level would be for this type of extension to the Custom Solution Wizard. If you have an internet-based neural network application in mind and this type of enhancement would be of interest to you, please let us know. Your feedback is very important in determining the path of our future development efforts.
Second, we need feedback as to what platform support would be of most use to you. We are considering creating an ActiveX component that can be used within active server pages (ASP) running on Internet Information Server (part of Microsoft’s Windows NT Server platform). The other option under consideration is to have the Custom Solution Wizard generate ANSI C++ source code that can be compiled and run on Unix-based web servers.
Finally, we need to know how you would use these internet-based neural networks. For example, would the neural networks be trained live on the internet or simply used for recall purposes using models pre-trained in NeuroSolutions. Please send your feedback or questions to csw@nd.com
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