This page contains code snippets, slides of lectures, and other useful and less useful material.
- The original digital photos used for extracting the chromatic content of environments can be found here. Two different series are available: (1) a series of digital photos of natural scenes (flora and fauna) and (2) digital photos of an urban environment (autumn, Brussels, 2004). These images were collected by Joris Bleys.
- The datasets used in Belpaeme, Tony and
Bleys, Joris (2005) Explaining universal colour
categories through a constrained acquisition
process.Adaptive Behavior. 13(3):293-310 can be
downloaded here.
In the experiments we used two datasets. One dataset containing a uniform distribution of colour stimuli, the other dataset containing a natural distribution of colour stimuli. Both datasets contain 25,000 stimuli. The "natural" dataset contains colours drawn from a number of images from nature scenery, the "uniform" dataset contains fabricated colours so as to fill the colour space uniformly.
The dataset: dataset_adaptive_behavior.zip (1.16Mb) and the images from which the "natural" dataset was drawn: nature.tif (4.13Mb). - Two video interviews can be found at Complexity Digest. One interview was shot at the Evolutionary Epistemology, Language, and Culture Conference (2004, Brussels) together with Luc Steels, the other interview, together with Paul Vogt, was taken at the European Conference on Artificial Life (Canterbury, 2005). Local copies can be found here: Steels-Belpaeme-EELC2005.asx (asx, 2.7Mb) and Belpaeme-Vogt-ECAL2005.asf (asf, 5.9Mb).
- Animation (mpeg, 18.7Mb) showing the evolution of the colour categories of 10 agents playing guessing games. The color categories are plotted centroids in the a*b*-plane of the CIE L*a*b*-space. Guessing games are simple communicative interactions, whereby one agent names a colour and another agent guesses that colour from a set of distractor colours. The guessing game provide a linguistic coupling between the agents' categories, this results in the colour categories becoming more and more similar. Thanks to Joris Bleys for creating this animation.
- Slides presented at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society Conference 2004 (Berlin, Germany) (Powerpoint, 2.11Mb or pdf, 4.45Mb). The presentation, titled "Innateness of colour categories is a red herring: insights from computational modelling", focuses on a number of possible explanations for the universality of colour categories. I suggest that a culture might have a profound influence on colour categorisation.
- Slides presented at the Evolutionary epistemology, Language and Culture conference 2004 (Brussels, Belgium) (Powerpoint, 3.73Mb or pdf, 4.59Mb) reporting on the origins of colour categories. The presentation includes a critical experiment on the environmental account of colour categorisation. This account states that colour categories can be explained as reflecting the distribution of colour seen by the individual.
- Slides of the Evolution of Language 2002 (Boston, MA) presentation "Are colour categories innate or learned? Insights from computational modelling" (Powerpoint, 10.2Mb and pdf, 1.76Mb). These report the results as also reported in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences article with Luc Steels (see my publications).
- Struggling with the bibliography requirements of a journal (why does every journal want its own bibliography style, is it so difficult to stick to a few standards), I came across a tool called MAKEBST to make custom BibTeX styles by answering a series of questions. Solved all my problems!
- Slides of lecture at the Universiteit of Amsterdam (UvA) on 28 Februari 2002, titled "Wat kan kunstmatige intelligentie ons leren over taal?" (pdf, 1.77Mb)