Temporal slowness as an unsupervised learning principle: self-organization of complex-cell receptive fields and application to pattern recognition
II Acknowledgments I am aware that this work would not have been possible without the help of many people, to which I am greatly indebted. My first thought goes to my advisor, Laurenz Wiskott, whose mathematical intuition never ceased to amaze me. In these years he taught me too many things to mention, mostly by his example, and I am extremely grateful for this. I hope I will be able to work with you again, sometime in the future. Tobias Blaschke was already working in Laurenz' group when I first arrived. He introduced me both to the secrets of the ITB and to Berlin. Thank you for all the technical discussions we had and even more for a lot of insider tips about Berlin nightlife. Special thanks to Tiziano Zito, colleague and friend, with whom I wrote a nice piece of software (MDP) and heard the guitar of Max Cavalera, live at the Columbiahalle. I shared the office also with Irina Erchova, Mathias Franzius, and Henning Sprekeler, whom I thank for all the espresso we brew with our Krups espresso-machine and for discussions and nonsenses. I would like to thank everybody else at the ITB for the nice atmosphere they created, and especially Thomas Voegtlin. Many thanks also to Prof. Andreas Herz for having provided such a nice research environment , and to Andreas Hantschmann and Christian Waltermann for the administration of the computer network, a vital part of our job. I thank Tim Gollish and Martin Stemmler for useful comments on my first manuscript, and Thomas Neukircher at the mathematical department for helping me with some insidious details of the mathematics of manifolds. This work has been supported by a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation. Thank you for that. A kiss to Eva, with whom I divided everything during our stay in Berlin. This thesis is dedicated to you. I am grateful to my mother, Daniela, and to my father, Hans, for their constant emotional and financial support during my studies and my PhD.