Related papers: Ambiguous signals and efficient codes
Real networks exhibit heterogeneous nature with nodes playing far different roles in structure and function. To identify vital nodes is thus very significant, allowing us to control the outbreak of epidemics, to conduct advertisements for…
Cells continuously sense their surroundings to detect modifications and generate responses. Very often changes in extracellular concentrations initiate signaling cascades that eventually result in changes in gene expression. Increasing…
A widely held assumption on network dynamics is that similar components are more likely to exhibit similar behavior than dissimilar ones and that generic differences among them are necessarily detrimental to synchronization. Here, we show…
Cells can utilize chemical communication to exchange information and coordinate their behavior in the presence of noise. Communication can reduce noise to shape a collective response, or amplify noise to generate distinct phenotypic…
The celebrated Bayesian persuasion model considers strategic communication between an informed agent (the sender) and uninformed decision makers (the receivers). The current rapidly-growing literature mostly assumes a dichotomy: either the…
The presence of noise in non linear dynamical systems can play a constructive role, increasing the degree of order and coherence or evoking improvements in the performance of the system. An example of this positive influence in a biological…
We study the optimality conditions of information transfer in systems with memory in the low signal-to-noise ratio regime of vanishing input amplitude. We find that the optimal mutual information is represented by a maximum-variance of the…
In this paper, we study the information-theoretic limits of oblivious transfer via noisy channels. We also investigate oblivious transfer over a noisy multiple-access channel with two non-colluding senders and a single receiver. The channel…
Communication is compositional if complex signals can be represented as a combination of simpler subparts. In this paper, we theoretically show that inductive biases on both the training framework and the data are needed to develop a…
Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
Biological cells encode information about their environment through biochemical signaling networks that control their internal state and response. This information is often encoded in the dynamical patterns of the signaling molecules,…
The effectiveness of machine learning algorithms depends on the quality and amount of data and the operationalization and interpretation by the human analyst. In humanitarian response, data is often lacking or overburdening, thus ambiguous,…
Reliably transmitting messages despite information loss due to a noisy channel is a core problem of information theory. One of the most important aspects of real world communication, e.g. via wifi, is that it may happen at varying levels of…
The manner in which groups of neurons represent events in the external world is fundamental to neuroscience. Here, we analyze the population code of the retina during naturalistic stimulation and show that the information conveyed by…
Biological systems, from cells to organisms, must respond to the ever changing environment in order to survive and function. This is not a simple task given the often random nature of the signals they receive, as well as the intrinsically…
The capacity with which a system of independent neuron-like units represents a given set of stimuli is studied by calculating the mutual information between the stimuli and the neural responses. Both discrete noiseless and continuous noisy…
Extracting useful information from data is a fundamental challenge across disciplines as diverse as climate, neuroscience, genetics, and ecology. In the era of ``big data'', data is ubiquitous, but appropriated methods are needed for…
In this paper, we study information cascades on graphs. In this setting, each node in the graph represents a person. One after another, each person has to take a decision based on a private signal as well as the decisions made by earlier…
Cells are constantly exposed to fluctuating environmental conditions. External signals are sensed, processed and integrated by cellular signal transduction networks, which translate input signals into specific cellular responses by means of…
Biochemistry, ecology, and neuroscience are examples of prominent fields aiming at describing interacting systems that exhibit non-trivial couplings to complex, ever-changing environments. We have recently shown that linear interactions and…