BEGIN:VCALENDAR BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:PhD Defense - James Tanner DESCRIPTION:PhD Candidate: James Tanner\n \n Chair: Laurent Itti\n Irving Biederman\n Nora Ayanian\n \n \n Understanding the Relationship Between Goals and Attention\n \n It is well-known that tasks have a large influence on human gaze, and there exist many saliency models that incorporate some form of top-down features. However, these are all learned features, and little research has gone into quantifying the effects of task on eye movement behavior in a way that can predict those effects a priori. First, we demonstrate a new learning rule that suggests how top-down connections might operate in the brain, from a functional perspective. Then, we propose a quantitative theory for measuring the relevance of information with respect to tasks. Finally, we perform an experiment to further validate this theory and utilize it to improve a saliency model. DTSTART:20171207T140000 LOCATION:GFS 109 URL;VALUE=URI: DTEND:20171207T160000 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR