Briefs

Two Southern California engineers have created a mathematical theory of surprise, working from first principles of probability theory applied to a digital environment -- and the results of experiments recording eye movements of volunteers watching video seem to confirm it.

Laurent Itti of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering and Pierre Baldi of the University of California Irvine's Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, will present their results December 7, at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference in Vancouver, B.C.

Itti and Baldi went back to first principles in developing their theory, taking off from fundamental work by Claude Shannon creating (in the title of his classic 1948 paper) "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." The pair's mathematical theory of surprise proposes an alternative mode for characterizing and quantifying information, distinct from Shannon's model -- a subjective one.

Shannon's technique is not about a specific observer, but any observer seeking to pick out a message from its noisy environment, or send one with an assurance it will be read accurately, according to Itti, a research assistant professor in the Viterbi School's department of computer science.

Here is the rest of the story and the NIPS-2005 presentation, Bayesian Surprise Attracts Human Attention, in NIPS*2005, by Itti and Baldi.