Zankl, A. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2021

Ontoclick: a Chrome web browser extension to facilitate biomedical knowledge curation

Knowledge curation from the biomedical literature is very valuable but can be a repetitive and laborious process. The paucity of user-friendly tools is one of the reasons for the lack of widespread adoption of good biomedical knowledge curation practices. Here we present Ontoclick, a web browser extension that streamlines the process of annotating a text span with a relevant ontology term. We hope this tool will make biocuration more accessible to a wider audience of biomedical researchers. Ontoclick is freely available under the GPL-3.0 license on the Chrome Web Store and on the Mozilla Add-Ons for Firefox Store. Source code and documentation are available at: https://github.com/azankl/Ontoclick Contact: andreas.zankl@sydney.edu.au

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2020

Intrinsic noise improves speech recognition in a computational model of the auditory pathway

Noise is generally considered to harm information processing performance. However, in the context of stochastic resonance, noise has been shown to improve signal detection of weak subthreshold signals, and it has been proposed that the brain might actively exploit this phenomenon. Especially within the auditory system, recent studies suggest that intrinsic noise plays a key role in signal processing and might even correspond to increased spontaneous neuronal firing rates observed in early processing stages of the auditory brain stem and cortex after hearing loss. Here we present a computational model of the auditory pathway based on a deep neural network, trained on speech recognition. We simulate different levels of hearing loss and investigate the effect of intrinsic noise. Remarkably, speech recognition after hearing loss actually improves with additional intrinsic noise. This surprising result indicates that intrinsic noise might not only play a crucial role in human auditory processing, but might even be beneficial for contemporary machine learning approaches.

neuroscience↗