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A comment on Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a viewer’s mind.

Re:Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a vi... by tokenadult on Thursday March 27, 2014 @04:14PM (#7483115)
Cool result, but where is a publication showing the faces that were actually tested and "reconstructed"? Many, many submissions to HN (like this one) are press releases, and press releases are well known for spinning preliminary research findings beyond all recognition. This has been commented on in the PhD comic "The Science News Cycle,"[1] which only exaggerates the process a very little. More serious commentary in the edited group blog post "Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"[2] points to the same danger of taking press releases (and news aggregator website articles based solely on press releases) too seriously. I look forward to seeing how this finding develops as it is commented on and reviewed by other researchers in peer-reviewed publications and attempts to replicate the finding.

The most sure and certain finding of any preliminary study will be that more research is needed. Disappointingly often, preliminary findings don't lead to further useful discoveries in science, because the preliminary findings are flawed. If the technique reported here can generalize at sufficiently low expense, it could lead to a lot of insight into the workings of the known-to-be complicated neural networks of the human brain used for recognizing faces.

A useful follow-up link for any discussion of a report on a research result like the one kindly submitted here is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"[3] by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.

[1] http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

[2] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by-coi...

[3] http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a vi... by anigbrowl on Thursday March 27, 2014 @04:34PM (#7483247)
Paper accessible via http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811914... if you have an academic login. Your points on experiemtnal design are good but I feel you're grandstanding a bit here; the reason the press release is posted is because it's so hard to get access to the text of scientific papers thanks to the publishing industry, so citing essays about experimental design ends up casting implicit aspersions on the quality of the authors' work, as if the paper would be more publicly available but for some reticence on their part.

I would like to see drastic changes to the journal publishing model, but I don't consider article inaccessibility to be correlated with flaws in the findings. To bring up the latter out of frustration over the former is poisoning the well of debate.

Incidentally, I found the paper in under 30 seconds by searching for the journal name, the senior author, and a few technical terms, all of which were in the press release and which gave me a correct first search result. It would be nice if the press release also contained a DOI link and other identifying information, but I can't really blame press departments for supplying journalists with the information they want and omitting that which most of them don't.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a vi... by icegreentea on Thursday March 27, 2014 @04:51PM (#7483378)
For those who don't have journal access, here's the part that you're probably most interested in: http://imgur.com/xzNwUTL

The left column is the original image. Next to it is a non-neural PCA/Eigenface reconstruction. Next to that are the reconstructions from a variety of brain regions.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a vi... by sillysaurus3 on Thursday March 27, 2014 @05:24PM (#7483586)
Would someone please upload the PDF for those of us who don't have academic logins? The current state of affairs precludes people from thinking critically. Instead we're forced to take publications at face value.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a vi... by kevinchen on Thursday March 27, 2014 @09:36PM (#7484745)
Here's the PDF. Science publishing sucks.

http://cl.ly/3F140E1t0p0j

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a vi... by sillysaurus3 on Thursday March 27, 2014 @10:21PM (#7484930)
You're wonderful! Thank you so much.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a vi... by icegreentea on Thursday March 27, 2014 @06:02PM (#7483834)
I'm away from campus now. I'll post if I remember. But for now, this is one of the investigator's website: http://camplab.psych.yale.edu/papers.html

He seems to have a pretty good track record of posting his papers there. This one isn't up yet (for one thing it isn't really fully published yet). Maybe you can check back later...

I know, it's super shitty. I have no idea what I'm going to do when I leave school.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a vi... by kbenson on Thursday March 27, 2014 @07:32PM (#7484243)
If I'm interpreting the visuals there correctly and some assumptions from it are correct (neither all that likely), it looks like it's fairly accurate at first, and the more images that are shown and reconstructed the more bleed-through of prior images can be sees when reconstructing.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a vi... by NoodleIncident on Friday March 28, 2014 @03:36AM (#7485820)
The caption for this image seems to indicate that the reconstructed images shown here are averaged over all test subjects; i.e., no one test subject was able to reconstruct the faces as well. There were only six of them, I suppose, but still.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a vi... by pigDisgusting on Thursday March 27, 2014 @08:03PM (#7484363)
My god. Those faces are like something out of my worst nightmares.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a vi... by agumonkey on Friday March 28, 2014 @07:30AM (#7486495)
What I would do to talk to researcher on this topic. My visual system has been playing games with my mind for a few years. It's like the internal 'reconstruction' device is fubar and can't stand still.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a vi... by daniel-cussen on Thursday March 27, 2014 @06:37PM (#7484018)
Next challenge for the Yale team: a way to reconstruct the actual research from science news.
[ Parent | on HN ]