Christopher Baker » Noteworthy

Article in the City Pages

Christopher Baker — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:07:29 +0000

Rod Smith just wrote an article about my work for the the City Pages. It runs alongside previews from some great Minneapolis artist/venues like the Jungle Theater, Trylon Cinema, and Bob Hammel’s new film SOLO: 1 X 2. Find it online now and on MSP newsstands Wed morning, September 16th.

MyMap wins “Best in Show”

Christopher Baker — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 18:31:53 +0000

MyMap was awarded “best in show” at the student design exhibition Monday evening. It was a great event and a wonderful opportunity for some true cross-disciplinary conversation.

It was also quite exciting to share the project with the larger public for the first time. Some viewers were skeptical that it was a custom program. Some assumed that it was hand drawn. I was also struck by how unexposed this kind of mapping remains. While I (and others) have been immersed in the field for a quite some time, and can easily see precedent for my work, many viewers did not have that same knowledge of the precedents. It was gratifying to be able to give them a glimpse of the field.

For more info on the project, take a look here.

COSYNE 2007 Abstract Accepted

Christopher Baker — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 19:38:22 +0000

An abstract I recently coauthored was submitted to the 2007 Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) conference. Much of the research I contributed was carried out at the CNL while I was working on my Masters of Biomedical Engineering at the BML with my brilliant advisor, Peter Steinmetz.

Title: Separate image durations activate distinct neuronal populations in the human medial temporal lobe
Authors: Eve Isham, Christopher Baker, Chris Thorp, William Banks, Peter Steinmetz

(a link)

60,000 Emails

Christopher Baker — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 22:30:14 +0000

Click on the images above …

Since 1998, I’ve been keeping all of my personal emails. I delete spam and obvious junkmail, but I keep everything else. There is a lot to be found in these emails. On some level they represent a personal history. I’ve been working on a Processsing application to help me begin to visualize the archive. A custom IMAP client accesses my email archive and imports addresses, names and other information from my address book. Over the course of 8 years, individuals use many different email addresses. In order to visualize individual relationships effectively, I have to keep track of all of the addresses. Since 1998, I have sent and received email from approximately 22 addresses.

These initial sketches attempt to reveal the underlying social networks latent in this huge archive of personal mail. Other versions of the visualization reveal more temporal aspects of relationship formation and decline.

I’m thinking of this in terms of a self-portrait initially. This particular visualization strategy was influenced by CAIDA, SCHEMABALL, GNOM, etc. An interactive version will be up sometime soon.

ZeroOne / ISEA 2006

Christopher Baker — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 20:21:24 +0000

I just purchased airfare to San Jose for the ZeroOne/ISEA 2006 conference. I will be reporting on the trip as it progresses.

There are a number of events, meetings, parties and gatherings that I look forward to being a part of. More later …

SFN 2006 Abstract Accepted

Christopher Baker — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 16:27:59 +0000

An abstract I recently coauthored was submitted to the 2006 Society of Neuroscience conference. Much of the research I contributed was carried out at the CNL while I was working on my Masters of Biomedical Engineering at the BML with my brilliant advisor, Peter Steinmetz.
Here’s a copy of the final submission.

Temporal dependence of single unit responses in human subjects during object categorization

*E. A. Isham 1,2, C. P. Baker 3, C. K. Thorp2, W. P. Banks 4, P. N. Steinmetz 2;
1 Department of Psychology, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA,
2 Harrington Department of Bioengineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ,
3 Biomedical Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN,
4 Department of Psychology, Pomona College, Claremont, CA.

During object recognition, both recognition performance and BOLD signals in object-specific areas (posterior fusiform gyrus and lateral occipital complex) increase with increasing presentation durations from 20 to 500 ms, reaching a plateau for > 120 ms. (Grill-Spector et al., 2000). By contrast, single unit responses during image categorization in the human medial temporal lobe, frontal and supplementary motor cortices have peak firing rates near 650 ms after stimulus onset (Kreiman et al., 2000).

To examine the timing of single neuron responses during categorization, we varied image duration from 300, 500, to 800 ms and studied 40 single unit responses (35 medial temporal, 1 frontal, and 4 supplementary motor) recorded from three medial temporal epilepsy patients. Between 15-20 pictures, selected from 6 image categories (animal, building, famous people, indoor scene, outdoor scene, and tools), were shown for each duration during a face/non-face categorization task. Of 40 neurons, 19 (15 medial temporal, 1 frontal, and 3 supplementary motor) showed a significant effect of duration on response magnitude, independent of the image category (2-way ANOVA, p < .05). 16 of these (only 12 medial temporal) were also independent of the specific image. These findings suggest that single neuron responses in the human medial temporal lobe, frontal and supplementary motor cortices are sensitive to the duration of images and may reflect decision making and other cognitive processes beyond simple recognition.