Publications
Publications from our Researchers
Several of our current PhD candidates and fellow researchers at the Data Science Institute have published, or in the proccess of publishing, papers to present their research.
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Journal articleRosas FE, Mediano PAM, Luppi AI, et al., 2022,
Disentangling high-order mechanisms and high-order behaviours in complex systems
, NATURE PHYSICS, ISSN: 1745-2473 -
Journal articleScagliarini T, Marinazzo D, Guo Y, et al., 2022,
Quantifying high-order interdependencies on individual patterns via the local O-information: Theory and applications to music analysis
, Physical Review Research, Vol: 4, ISSN: 2643-1564High-order, beyond-pairwise interdependencies are at the core of biological, economic, and social complex systems, and their adequate analysis is paramount to understand, engineer, and control such systems. This paper presents a framework to measure high-order interdependence that disentangles their effect on each individual pattern exhibited by a multivariate system. The approach is centered on the local O-information, a new measure that assesses the balance between synergistic and redundant interdependencies at each pattern. To illustrate the potential of this framework, we present a detailed analysis of music scores from J. S. Bach, which reveals how high-order interdependence is deeply connected with highly nontrivial aspects of the musical discourse. Our results place the local O-information as a promising tool of wide applicability, which opens other perspectives for analyzing high-order relationships in the patterns exhibited by complex systems.
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Journal articlePeill JM, Trinci KE, Kettner H, et al., 2022,
Validation of the psychological insight scale: a new scale to assess psychological insight following a psychedelic experience
, Journal of Psychopharmacology, Vol: 36, Pages: 31-45, ISSN: 0269-8811Introduction:As their name suggests, ‘psychedelic’ (mind-revealing) compounds are thought to catalyse processes of psychological insight; however, few satisfactory scales exist to sample this. This study sought to develop a new scale to measure psychological insight after a psychedelic experience: the Psychological Insight Scale (PIS).Methods:The PIS is a six- to seven-item questionnaire that enquires about psychological insight after a psychedelic experience (PIS-6) and accompanied behavioural changes (PIS item 7). In total, 886 participants took part in a study in which the PIS and other questionnaires were completed in a prospective fashion in relation to a planned psychedelic experience. For validation purposes, data from 279 participants were analysed from a non-specific ‘global psychedelic survey’ study.Results:Principal components analysis of PIS scores revealed a principal component explaining 73.57% of the variance, which displayed high internal consistency at multiple timepoints throughout the study (average Cronbach’s α = 0.94). Criterion validity was confirmed using the global psychedelic survey study, and convergent validity was confirmed via the Therapeutic-Realizations Scale. Furthermore, PIS scores significantly mediated the relationship between emotional breakthrough and long-term well-being.Conclusion:The PIS is complementary to current subjective measures used in psychedelic studies, most of which are completed in relation to the acute experience. Insight – as measured by the PIS – was found to be a key mediator of long-term psychological outcomes following a psychedelic experience. Future research may investigate how insight varies throughout a psychedelic process, its underlying neurobiology and how it impacts behaviour and mental health.
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Journal articleDekkers G, Rosas F, van Waterschoot T, et al., 2022,
Dynamic sensor activation and decision-level fusion in wireless acoustic sensor networks for classification of domestic activities
, Information Fusion, Vol: 77, Pages: 196-210, ISSN: 1566-2535For the past decades there has been a rising interest for wireless sensor networks to obtain information about an environment. One interesting modality is that of audio, as it is highly informative for numerous applications including speech recognition, urban scene classification, city monitoring, machine listening and classifying domestic activities. However, as they operate at prohibitively high energy consumption, commercialisation of battery-powered wireless acoustic sensor networks has been limited. To increase the network's lifetime, this paper explores the joint use of decision-level fusion and dynamic sensor activation. Hereby adopting a topology where processing – including feature extraction and classification – is performed on a dynamic set of sensor nodes that communicate classification outputs which are fused centrally. The main contribution of this paper is the comparison of decision-level fusion with different dynamic sensor activation strategies on the use case of automatically classifying domestic activities. Results indicate that using vector quantisation to encode the classification output, computed at each sensor node, can reduce the communication per classification output to 8 bit without loss of significant performance. As the cost for communication is reduced, local processing tends to dominate the overall energy budget. It is indicated that dynamic sensor activation, using a centralised approach, can reduce the average time a sensor node is active up to 20% by leveraging redundant information in the network. In terms of energy consumption, this resulted in an energy reduction of up to 80% as the cost for computation dominates the overall energy budget.
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Journal articleMediano PAM, Rosas FE, Farah JC, et al., 2022,
Integrated information as a common signature of dynamical and information-processing complexity
, Chaos: an interdisciplinary journal of nonlinear science, Vol: 32, Pages: 1-12, ISSN: 1054-1500The apparent dichotomy between information-processing and dynamical approaches to complexity science forces researchers to choose between two diverging sets of tools and explanations, creating conflict and often hindering scientific progress. Nonetheless, given the shared theoretical goals between both approaches, it is reasonable to conjecture the existence of underlying common signatures that capture interesting behavior in both dynamical and information-processing systems. Here, we argue that a pragmatic use of integrated information theory (IIT), originally conceived in theoretical neuroscience, can provide a potential unifying framework to study complexity in general multivariate systems. By leveraging metrics put forward by the integrated information decomposition framework, our results reveal that integrated information can effectively capture surprisingly heterogeneous signatures of complexity—including metastability and criticality in networks of coupled oscillators as well as distributed computation and emergent stable particles in cellular automata—without relying on idiosyncratic, ad hoc criteria. These results show how an agnostic use of IIT can provide important steps toward bridging the gap between informational and dynamical approaches to complex systems.Originally conceived within theoretical neuroscience, integrated information theory (IIT) has been rarely used in other fields—such as complex systems or non-linear dynamics—despite the great value it has to offer. In this article, we inspect the basics of IIT, dissociating it from its contentious claims about the nature of consciousness. Relieved of this philosophical burden, IIT presents itself as an appealing formal framework to study complexity in biological or artificial systems, applicable in a wide range of domains. To illustrate this, we present an exploration of integrated information in complex systems and relate it to other notions of complexity commonly used in sys
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Journal articleVermeulen T, Reynders B, Rosas FE, et al., 2021,
Performance analysis of in-band collision detection for dense wireless networks
, Eurasip Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Vol: 2021, Pages: 1-23, ISSN: 1687-1472With the massive growth of wireless networks comes a bigger impact of collisions and interference, which has a negative effect on throughput and energy efficiency. To deal with this problem, we propose an in-band wireless collision and interference detection scheme based on full-duplex technology. To study its performance, we compare its throughput and energy efficiency with the performance of traditional half-duplex and symmetric in-band full-duplex transmissions. Our analysis considers a realistic protocol and overhead modeling, and a measurement-based self-interference model. Our results indicate that our proposed collision detection scheme can provide significant gains in terms of throughput and energy efficiency in large wireless networks. Moreover, when compared to half-duplex and symmetric full-duplex, our analysis shows that this scheme allows up to 45% more nodes in the network for the same energy consumption per bit. These results suggest that this could be an enabling technology towards efficient, dense wireless networks.
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Journal articleKettlun F, Rosas F, Oberli C, 2021,
A low-complexity channel training method for efficient SVD beamforming over MIMO channels
, Eurasip Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Vol: 2021, Pages: 1-22, ISSN: 1687-1472Singular value decomposition (SVD) beamforming is an attractive tool for reducing the energy consumption of data transmissions in wireless sensor networks whose nodes are equipped with multiple antennas. However, this method is often not practical due to two important shortcomings: it requires channel state information at the transmitter and the computation of the SVD of the channel matrix is generally too complex. To deal with these issues, we propose a method for establishing an SVD beamforming link without requiring feedback of actual channel or SVD coefficients to the transmitter. Concretely, our method takes advantage of channel reciprocity and a power iteration algorithm (PIA) for determining the precoding and decoding singular vectors from received preamble sequences. A low-complexity version that performs no iterations is proposed and shown to have a signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) loss within 1 dB of the bit error rate of SVD beamforming with least squares channel estimates. The low-complexity method significantly outperforms maximum ratio combining diversity and Alamouti coding. We also show that the computational cost of the proposed PIA-based method is less than the one of using the Golub–Reinsch algorithm for obtaining the SVD. The number of computations of the low-complexity version is an order of magnitude smaller than with Golub–Reinsch. This difference grows further with antenna array size.
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Journal articleTimmermann Slater CB, Kettner H, Letheby C, et al., 2021,
Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs
, Scientific Reports, Vol: 11, Pages: 1-12, ISSN: 2045-2322Can the use of psychedelic drugs induce lasting changes in metaphysical beliefs? While it is popularly believed that they can, this question has never been formally tested. Here we exploited a large sample derived from prospective online surveying to determine whether and how beliefs concerning the nature of reality, consciousness, and free-will, change after psychedelic use. Results revealed significant shifts away from ‘physicalist’ or ‘materialist’ views, and towards panpsychism and fatalism, post use. With the exception of fatalism, these changes endured for at least 6 months, and were positively correlated with the extent of past psychedelic-use and improved mental-health outcomes. Path modelling suggested that the belief-shifts were moderated by impressionability at baseline and mediated by perceived emotional synchrony with others during the psychedelic experience. The observed belief-shifts post-psychedelic-use were consolidated by data from an independent controlled clinical trial. Together, these findings imply that psychedelic-use may causally influence metaphysical beliefs—shifting them away from ‘hard materialism’. We discuss whether these apparent effects are contextually independent.
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Journal articleLuppi A, Mediano PAM, Rosas FE, et al., 2021,
What it is like to be a bit: an integrated information decomposition account of emergent mental phenomena
, Neuroscience of Consciousness, Vol: 7, ISSN: 2057-2107A central question in neuroscience concerns the relationship between consciousness and its physical substrate. Here, we argue that a richer characterization of consciousness can be obtained by viewing it as constituted of distinct information-theoretic elements. In other words, we propose a shift from quantification of consciousness—viewed as integrated information—to its decomposition. Through this approach, termed Integrated Information Decomposition (ΦID), we lay out a formal argument that whether the consciousness of a given system is an emergent phenomenon depends on its information-theoretic composition—providing a principled answer to the long-standing dispute on the relationship between consciousness and emergence. Furthermore, we show that two organisms may attain the same amount of integrated information, yet differ in their information-theoretic composition. Building on ΦID’s revised understanding of integrated information, termed ΦR, we also introduce the notion of ΦR-ing ratio to quantify how efficiently an entity uses information for conscious processing. A combination of ΦR and ΦR-ing ratio may provide an important way to compare the neural basis of different aspects of consciousness. Decomposition of consciousness enables us to identify qualitatively different ‘modes of consciousness’, establishing a common space for mapping the phenomenology of different conscious states. We outline both theoretical and empirical avenues to carry out such mapping between phenomenology and information-theoretic modes, starting from a central feature of everyday consciousness: selfhood. Overall, ΦID yields rich new ways to explore the relationship between information, consciousness, and its emergence from neural dynamics.
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Journal articleGan HM, Fernando S, Molina-Solana M, 2021,
Scalable object detection pipeline for traffic cameras: Application to Tfl JamCams
, Expert Systems with Applications, Vol: 182, Pages: 1-15, ISSN: 0957-4174With CCTV systems being installed in the transport infrastructures of many cities, there is an abundance of data to be extracted from the footage. This paper explores the application of the YOLOv3 object detection algorithm trained on the COCO dataset to the Transport for London’s (TfL) JamCam feed. The result, open-sourced and publicly available, is a series of easy to deploy Docker pipelines to create, store and serve (through a REST API) data on identified objects on that feed. The pipelines can be deployed to any Linux machine with an NVIDIA GPU to support accelerated computation. We studied how different confidence thresholds affect detections of relevant objects (cars, trucks and pedestrians) in London JamCam scenes. By running the system continuously for 3 weeks, we built a dataset of more than 2200 detection datapoints for each camera (̃6 datapoints an hour). We further visualised the detections on an animated geospatial map, showcasing their effectiveness in identifying traffic patterns typical of an urban city like London, portraying the variation on different object population levels throughout the day.
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Journal articleKuc J, Kettner H, Rosas F, et al., 2021,
Psychedelic experience dose-dependently modulated by cannabis: results of a prospective online survey
, Psychopharmacology, ISSN: 0033-3158Rationale.Classic psychedelics are currently being studied as novel treatments for a range of psychiatric disorders. However, research on how psychedelics interact with other psychoactive substances remains scarce.ObjectivesThe current study aimed to explore the subjective effects of psychedelics when used alongside cannabis.MethodsParticipants (n = 321) completed a set of online surveys at 2 time points: 7 days before, and 1 day after a planned experience with a serotonergic psychedelic. The collected data included demographics, environmental factors (so-called setting) and five validated questionnaires: Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ), visual subscales of Altered States of Consciousness Questionnaire (ASC-Vis), Challenging Experience Questionnaire (CEQ), Ego Dissolution Inventory (EDI) and Emotional Breakthrough Inventory (EBI). Participants were grouped according to whether they had reported using no cannabis (n = 195) or low (n = 53), medium (n = 45) or high (n = 28) dose, directly concomitant with the psychedelic. Multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) and contrasts was used to analyse differences in subjective effects between groups while controlling for potential confounding contextual ‘setting’ variables.ResultsThe simultaneous use of cannabis together with classic serotonergic psychedelics was associated with more intense psychedelic experience across a range of measures: a linear relationship was found between dose and MEQ, ASC-Vis and EDI scores, while a quadratic relationship was found for CEQ scores. No relationship was found between the dose of cannabis and the EBI.ConclusionsResults imply a possible interaction between the cannabis and psychedelic on acute subjective experiences; however, design limitations hamper our ability to draw firm inferences on directions of causality and the clinical implications of any such interactions.
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Journal articleGatica M, Cofre R, Mediano PAM, et al., 2021,
High-Order Interdependencies in the Aging Brain
, BRAIN CONNECTIVITY, Vol: 11, Pages: 734-744, ISSN: 2158-0014- Author Web Link
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Journal articleMediano PAM, Rosas FE, Barrett AB, et al., 2021,
Decomposing Spectral and Phasic Differences in Nonlinear Features between Datasets
, Physical Review Letters, Vol: 127, ISSN: 0031-9007 -
Journal articleRosas De Andraca FE, Morales P,
A generalisation of the maximum entropy principle for curved statistical manifolds
, Physical Review Research, ISSN: 2643-1564The maximum entropy principle (MEP) is one of the most prominent methods to investigate andmodel complex systems. Despite its popularity, the standard form of the MEP can only generateBoltzmann-Gibbs distributions, which are ill-suited for many scenarios of interest. As a principledapproach to extend the reach of the MEP, this paper revisits its foundations in information geometryand shows how the geometry of curved statistical manifolds naturally leads to a generalisation of theMEP based on the Rényi entropy. By establishing a bridge between non-Euclidean geometry andthe MEP, our proposal sets a solid foundation for the numerous applications of the Rényi entropy,and enables a range of novel methods for complex systems analysis.
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Conference paperRosas FE, Mediano PAM, Gastpar M, 2021,
Learning, compression, and leakage: Minimising classification error via meta-universal compression principles
, 2020 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 1-5Learning and compression are driven by the common aim of identifying and exploiting statistical regularities in data, which opens the door for fertile collaboration between these areas. A promising group of compression techniques for learning scenarios is normalised maximum likelihood (NML) coding, which provides strong guarantees for compression of small datasets — in contrast with more popular estimators whose guarantees hold only in the asymptotic limit. Here we consider a NMLbased decision strategy for supervised classification problems, and show that it attains heuristic PAC learning when applied to a wide variety of models. Furthermore, we show that the misclassification rate of our method is upper bounded by the maximal leakage, a recently proposed metric to quantify the potential of data leakage in privacy-sensitive scenarios.
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