Andrew Barron
Department of Biological Sciences
Macquarie University
Australia
Biography
I study the neural mechanisms of natural animal behaviour. The brain evolved to equip animals to solve fundamental survival problems: recognising and finding food resources and mates, avoiding danger, successfully navigating the world and finding home. Studying how the neural mechanisms of the brain enable animals to solve these tasks is the best way to examine how brains function and how brains evolved.
Research Interest
My research examines how animals recognise, classify and learn features of their environment, and how they navigate. Much of my research studies honey bees, which demonstrate remarkably complex social behaviour, communication, learning abilities and navigation with a relatively tiny and comprehensible brain. The bee is an extremely powerful system for exploring the neural mechanisms of animal cognition in both laboratory and natural settings.
Publications
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Barron A, Birgé L, Massart P. Risk bounds for model selection via penalization. Probability theory and related fields. 1999 Feb 1;113(3):301-413.
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Barron A, Rissanen J, Yu B. The minimum description length principle in coding and modeling. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 1998 Oct;44(6):2743-60.
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Barron AR. Universal approximation bounds for superpositions of a sigmoidal function. IEEE Transactions on Information theory. 1993 May;39(3):930-45.
