The NN Website and the NN Directory

NN Website

All of us should have our own home page up to date with a research description and a picture. The database nicely cross-references areas, people, projects, demos, publications, and software so that those fields are automatically populated in your home page (and similarly in all other pages). Whenever you have produced something new, like a paper, demo, or software, please make an entry for it in the database. The fields are usually clear enough, but there are also instructions on what needs to be included and how---please make sure you follow the instructions!

NN Directory

However, feel free to contribute to the archive if you come across something that should go in here. Also, if you find any errors or out-of-date information in any of the readme files or elsewhere, feel free to fix them.

If you add something, remember to update the appropriate README file (usually in the same directory). Also, there might be pages in this user's guide that should refer to it, so check that as well. If it is something major (a new tool etc), also send email to nn to let people know. If you plan to update something drastically, it might be a good idea to move the old version to /u/nn/tmp/old rather than deleting it, just in case. The directories and files should be nn writable: say "chmod g+w file" and "chgrp nn file", or else say "/u/nn/bin/updatepermis directory" to change an entire directory and its subdirectories at once.

Some directories are marked "Write access controlled by CVS" in the list below. These are the directories whose contents are edited regularly; CVS helps to us keep track of the various edits made by different people. Please do not directly edit any of the files in the CVS-controlled directories in /u/nn. Instead, check out the corresponding CVS project (cvs checkout project-name) into your own home directory, edit your local copy of the files, and then commit the changes. (The project-name is the CVS module name for the project; it is usually the same as the directory name, e.g. "bin" for /u/nn/bin.) These steps are all described in the README files in each directory.

Here's a short summary of what's in /u/nn:

• "aliases" has the email alias for the nn group, as well as aliases for various projects.
• "bibs" has various bibliography files. The file nn.bib is our primary bibliographic database for cognitive connectionism and neural networks. Write access controlled by CVS (project "bibs").
• "bin" has various useful shell scripts, e.g. for updating nn file protections etc. Write access controlled by CVS (project "bin").
• "cvsroot" is the repository for our web pages and for various software packages. Unless you really know what you are doing, do not change any of these files by hand.
• "data" has various training data (such as NetTalk, character recognition, hansards), or at least publically-available subsets of large sets for evaluation purposes. The directory cs:/projects has more.
• "demos.other" contains various working demos that aren't quite ready for the public pages but may be run locally and used in talks etc. Most of them are in /u/risto/demos, but here are a few others. The scripts that run them are intended for linux laptops/desktops. See also LocalDemos for instructions on how to run the demos in /u/nn/demos.
• "mail" stores email to the nn alias during previous years (since 8/21/94; current year is in "mailbox".
• "mailbox" is the archive of messages sent to the nn alias during the current year.
• "models" has source code for various neural network models and architectures, including handy copies of our own models (most of which are also on the website), and other publicly available code.
• "old" has various directories that are probably no longer useful.
• "projects" is an archive of various past projects that somebody might want to pick up and continue some day.
• "public_html", alias "www-site" is a link to our World Wide Web pages. Write access to subdirectory "pages" is controlled by CVS (project "pages").
• "simulators" has source code and executables for various old general-purpose neural network simulators, including Miyata's PlaNet, PDP-software of McClelland and Rumelhart, Stuttgart Neural Network simulator... and also a number of domain simulators such as Khepera mobile robot, boat simulator, etc. that can be used as testbeds for reinforcement learning.
• "tex" has macros and examples for formatting papers, letters, posters, and talks with latex. They may be useful if Overleaf is not an option for some reason. Write access controlled by CVS (project "tex").
• "tmp" is a working directory. You can use if if you want to e.g. share some files while you are working on a project with someone, or if you just need more temporary file space. Create a subdirectory for yourself (with your username as the directory name) and delete the files once you no longer need them. This directory is periodically cleaned up so don't store anything permanent there.
• "tools" has various research tools like cluster analysis, principal component analysis, numerical recipes, statistical significance testing...