what's around you, but I'd like some clarification on that. If you're matching the houses along Salix Drive, that sounds good. They've got nice lots, but if you're gonna match Jordan at South Point, I don't like it at all. Sure. Yeah, I would say it's more conforming with the area, which is Lions Farm down in Scott King, Jordan at South Point, Clawson Drive, just at the corner of Herndon Road in Scott King. All those developments are all... Good, because Jordan at South Point, in my opinion, is a mess. Well, it's a very large project and it was developed under RR, so they got 177 lots in there. I'm not telling somebody to already know, but the lots are smaller than what we were proposing. Okay. It's the same. It was also supposed to be a conservation subdivision. Any additional questions? But that's all I have. I'm just, again, sorry we didn't have more detail presented to us. Thank you, Commissioner Bryan. Commissioner Hyman? Yes, I wanted to ask the developer a question, please. And it's in regards to the issues raised by the resident. She mentioned infrastructure improvements and thin streets with thin streets.  On Salix Drive? Yes. It's my understanding that Mayor Tosh Holmes, who developed Jordan at South Point, brought that up to city standards. I guess it doesn't have curb and gutter, but it was resurfaced from what it was before they purchased the property. And I'm sorry, what was your follow-up there? So it's your observation then that the streets have been brought up to standard. I noticed that she had mentioned that there was some patching, but streets normally have to meet approval. So you're saying those streets have met the required approvals, is that correct? It has been resurfaced once Jordan at South Point was. Re-surface, yes, but have they met requirements for streets are normally approved and then turned over when they are suitable and substantial to meet? I'm not sure what the plan was with Jordan at South Point, as we weren't involved with that project. I don't know what they committed to the city. I just know that streets can sometimes be a big surprise to individuals and they find out after the fact that they're not up to standard. So I think that that's something that needs to be known upfront. Okay, thank you. Any additional questions, Commissioner Hyman? No, thank you. Commissioner Miller. Do you know, have you made any kind of testing or anything about whether or not it's going to be necessary to blast in order to install city, sewer and water? We have not gotten that far. We do think it won't, we're not planning on it right now. Our Topo, we do have a slope to Salix Drive. So we do think we shouldn't have a problem with our depth of sewer. And there's sewer and water currently in Scott King? There's water. Water, sewer's not available. So how are you going to do sewer service? Coming up Salix Drive to the north to our property. Oh, you're going to bring it up? Yes sir. Okay, that's interesting. So your water will come from Scott King and your sewer service is going to come up Salix? Yeah, we haven't decided on water. So you're going to be cutting Salix up again? All right. Yeah, we haven't decided on water. We could get it from Scott King. And Bill, my partner Bill Ripley could maybe speak to that a little bit more, but... But he left. No, there he is. What are you going to do, Bill, do you know? And if you can come to the microphone, please introduce yourself, your name, address and address the question from Commissioner Miller. Thank you. Bill Ripley, 5011 South Park Drive Durham. Utilities, I give you an honest answer. We're going to do what the city tells us to do. And sewer obviously is coming from the south, Jordan at South Point coming up Salix. Water is available to the north or the south and it may be coming from both directions. So it's up to the engineering department to tell us what's required. So best I can tell you we're going to serve it one way or the other with utilities. But today is either water or sewer in Salix Drive. Sewer is in Salix, water and sewer both in Salix at the south terminus of Miss Young's property. Okay, but it's down at the bottom. It doesn't come up. It's about 200 feet from our property. So we'll be bringing it up to Salix and the city will also infrastructure. They will make us fix or repair that street to whatever standard the city has. Right now it's a state maintained road. And this is a very odd shaped piece of property. Can you get, how many 20,000 square foot lots can you get out of that piece of property? Do you think? Up to 11, maybe 10. We won't know until we site plan. You think you can get 11 in there? What I see is a street coming in in two bulbs. Yeah, it could be 10. We haven't gotten that far. All right, very good. And are you going to develop this or are you going to pass it on to somebody else? We do plan on developing this sir. All right, very good. Any additional questions? Commissioner Miller? No, I'm not done. Anyone else? Any additional questions or comments? Commissioner Bryan? We'll solve all for the wall question, but in the course of bringing water and sewer up Salix or down Salix or some combination of both to serve your project, could it be set up so that in the future, if it was necessary the people who currently live along Salix could ultimately connect? Yes, they could. I believe there's frontage fees and cap facility fees associated with that, but yeah. Okay, thank you. Make one clarification. Yes. Planning department. So the statement about the Salix being that the city could require that the developer bring it up to city standards that is actually in the county. So that is not something that is guaranteed that that would happen. Yeah, that's it's a state road. Right, I was speaking with Mr. Judge and the utilities more than likely. I'm not an engineer. I'm just putting this on the record so you know that they may not even be allowed to put them under the pavement. The state would not normally allow for that to happen. They would have to be put in the shoulder potentially versus under the pavement. So that has not been determined yet, but I just wanted to make sure that no one left this meeting thinking that this road was gonna be improved to city standard. No, I was just afraid it was gonna be torn up again. Yeah, I just wanted to make that clear. Thank you. It's not coming into the city. Right, and in order, well, we've discussed whether she'd be riding or not and that might be something that we talk about at a later date, but I know that right now it's not proposed to be as part of this application. Yeah, my question actually was where sewer and water extensions were gonna go. Right, but I think there was a comment made about, I think there was a comment made about that it would be improved to city standards. I think I heard that and I just wanted to make sure that we clarified that that might not be the case. Right, okay, thank you. Any additional questions or comments? Discussion or a motion? Mr. Chairman, I'm gonna move that we send cases E1700054 concerning the property at Salix Drive forward to the city council with a favorable recommendation. Is there a second? Second. Moved by Commissioner Miller, seconded by Commissioner Alturk and we'll have a roll call vote please. Commissioner Alturk? Yes. Commissioner Johnson? Yes. Commissioner Gouche? Yes. Commissioner Bryan? Yes. Commissioner Harris? Yes. Commissioner Hyman? Yes. Chair Busby? Yes. Commissioner Miller? Yes. Commissioner Kinchin? Yes. Commissioner Van? Yes. Commissioner Gibbs? Yes. Motion carries 11 to zero. Thank you. So our final official item on tonight's agenda is a text amendment to the Unified Development Ordinance. This is TC-18 WD04 zoning permit. Thank you, Jacob Wiggins of the Planning Department. No presentation for this item. So there's an attached ordinance in your packet. This is a new permit or new initiative from the Development Services Center. The zoning permit would be required for new single family developments, duplex projects, perhaps accessory structures, decks, et cetera. And it also would apply to changes of views where there is not a site plan required. I'm currently in terms of residential development. These cases are, these new homes are being reviewed on a case-by-case basis between the inspections department and the planning department. This permit is designed to clarify that process, both for planning staff and inspection staff. Presently inspections reviews all single family permits. They will interface with planning when they have questions. Sometimes between the two parties we're looking at different things that we don't catch everything. So the zoning permit is designed to something that would be applied prior to building permits so that it would clarify both things for planning staff or inspection staff, as well as the applicant. Because part of this review on staff will note if there's any other issues on the property that have not been brought up, perhaps there's something that would require board of adjustment action or things of that nature. So before someone gets to the building permit stage and invest that amount of money, this is kind of a quick check on the front end for that. Another part of it is some of you all may recall that the city used to have business licenses. Most municipalities in the state did until the state took that option of way. That was one way that planning staff tracked change of uses that don't require a site plan. This is because someone would have to come in for that verification to get that. So we've not had that for the last couple of years. So this process, this permit will also help streamline that process for staff. There will be a nominal fee. It is currently projected to be $30 for this permit. And I'm happy to answer any questions that the commission may have about this ordinance and permit process. Thank you, Mr. Wiggins. We do have a public hearing, am I correct? That's associated. So we will open the public hearing and see if anyone has signed up. Great, thank you. I'm sure we'll be back with questions. Yes, Mr. Bill Ripley has signed up to speak. Bill, welcome back. Bill Ripley, 51 South Park. I shouldn't speak to this, but I agree with Mr. Miller on this. This is a new process. This is, basically it's a new tax, but it's not gonna hurt me or developers. This is a homeowner tax. When you wanna build a deck, or put a cement pool in and add it to your house, or every builder that builds a new single-family house. And while it's proposed at 30 today, it's 100 next year, 300 next year. But the biggest problem, pass it, be along with it, shouldn't expire in three months. There's no reason an architect and a homeowner and a builder should have their permit expire in three months. They gotta come back and get another one. It's the same thing as looking at the map. It says zoning is R20, you can do X. Charge the citizens for it if you want to, but it should be good for at least a year. That's all I'm gonna do. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm gonna just close the public hearing. And we have one other person who just gave me the thumbs up. So we'll close the public hearing. Commissioners, Commissioner Alturk. I just wanted to ask staff to comment on that last comment by Mr. Ripley, is that right? About expiring in three months rather than longer? Yeah, so I'll clarify that. The permit would expire if one does not apply for a building permit within three months. So it's because factors change pretty regularly. Yeah, I think that's the intent behind that. So if they apply for it, then it can... Yeah, if you get your zoning permit, again, the zoning permit is something that is proposed to be reviewed within a couple of business days. So the idea being that you get that check and then, or you get that permit checked off and then proceed to building at that point. You wait three or four months, you may need to come back in and get a new zoning permit before you proceed to the building permit stage. Thank you. Commissioner Johnson. So following up to that, I'm Mr. Wiggins. So what factors are you all considering that has triggered the three months threshold? And I ask this in the sense that you can get a building permit and you have, what, 12 months to actually execute what you're gonna do under your building permit before you have to get a new one. So factors can change then, but it's basically at your grandfathered end. So what is it about the zoning three month threshold that causes you to give a shorter timeline? That's a very good question. Commissioner Johnson, I'm gonna defer to Robin Young on that one. If you can't move the microphone in 30 days, it expires. I'm Robin Young with the Development Services Center. So with the purpose of the zoning permit is what happens typically is a homeowner comes in and wants to do some kind of construction item or builds a construction item and then inspections has to go out and check it out. And then they come back to planning to say, hey, are the setbacks right? Is the impervious surface right before they'll sign off on the building permit?  It's ready to go. We've seen the plot plan with the setbacks and now all we can do is check it and then give the building permit. And so inspections has even said they can apply for both the zoning permit and the building permit at the same time. And but inspections will not move forward until the zoning permit is complete. And we're hoping that that helps staff and citizens with faster processing. So that's helpful. Quick question for staff. How much is in I haven't paid, haven't gotten one in recently, but how much is the building permit, the cost? Jacob Wiggins with the Plain Department. It varies, typically based on the square footage of what you're doing and the type of use. Just confirming. So it seems like one of the goals is to incentivize basically action in part on behalf of the homeowner or whoever is applying. But what if there are financial factors or something that just doesn't allow a homeowner to move as quickly as the city would desire. It seems that this is a little punitive and that I can get started and then deal with whatever it takes for me to get to the building permit application. But now you're saying that there may be duplicative costs for the zoning permit because I didn't do it within three months. And so that's just the issue that I have in regards to that the rationale. I get the logic, but it's the... So just remember it's not that they have to get their building permit, they just have to apply for it. Most people come in and know they wanna build a deck or they wanna build a structure, a shed in their backyard. And so we then sit down with them and say, okay, you can do this, it has to be this far off the rear property line, this far off. And so that way they have this zoning permit and they have all the regulations, all the demographics, everything they need to in order to make it work. And then it can go straight to building and inspections. Yep, I get you. I'm just my concerns, but I told you where you're coming. No, it's a valid point. And I'm trying to figure out how to say that inspections is also looking forward to this happening to help them so they don't have to circle back and have time delays by coming back to planning. Commissioner Goesch. So Robin, I think this is probably for you. Can you just walk me through? So I apply for a zoning permit, what happens? And this is for structures. I do wanna clarify that it's not for fences or swimming pools, but it is for a deck or anything that would cause impervious surface, a structure, another dwelling on the property. And so there's one application to fill out. And once that's filled out and paid, then our staff goes through and marks everything from environmental to impervious surface to setbacks to historic districts to MPO so that all the information is completed and then it spits out a permit in our computer system, which is then linked to the inspections department. And it can flag them and say, hey, if they've submitted their building permit, their zoning permit's ready to go, you can now take this and run with it. So is there a site visit? There's not a site visit for the zoning permit. Okay. We can look up the zoning online and we have all the regulations for that online. Which was actually the point that I was making. I don't really understand what the point of the zoning permit is.  It also occurs to me, I might be wrong on this, that a zoning verification letter costs 14 bucks. I'm not real clear on why this zoning permit will cost 30 bucks. I recognize that there are some other things that they check, but I mean, all of this stuff is generally available online. If the point is to assist the inspections department, make it run more smoothly, I feel like some internal training could take care of that. This is something that I think a regular citizen with enough time on their hand can look up online like you said. Sure. Commissioner Goves, I would agree with that. I think what we see as staff is that regular citizens don't have the time to do that. Probably. I think part of this, I agree with you, this is kind of similar to a zoning verification letter. Yeah, and basically, yeah, the intent is this will ultimately replace that. So this isn't just something like Robin mentioned, this isn't something where you're basically getting a plot plan, we're just checking yes. We're gonna do basically like we would with the zoning verification analysis, we're gonna look at all different parameters of the site. True, someone from the inspections department could do that, but the inspections department is also tasked with enforcing the North Carolina State Building Code. So there's only so much time they have on their hands as well. The staff is also looking at, in terms of the fee, staff is looking at some options to reduce the fee for families. We haven't gotten that approved yet, but that is, if needed, if there are fee reductions for people if this is an owner's cost, there may be some options for that. But yeah, I think basically we see this as ultimately replacing the zoning verification, but also giving someone a little bit more information than they would normally get. Sometimes you may have experienced this, you submit a building permit, and they'll say, denied, go talk to planning. And that's not necessarily very helpful to a citizen in that regard. So this would hopefully give them all the information they need, basically we're gonna do all that research for them on the front end for $30. Yeah, and I actually am not necessarily opposed to having this replace the zoning verification letter. I think maybe the part I have trouble with is why this would be required. Like, a zoning verification letter is not required in any circumstances, the service that the city planning department provides. And when a citizen finds a need for it, they pay for one and they get it. And I would agree that that zoning verification letter itself could be more robust. This sounds like a more robust zoning verification letter, but making it a requirement for, I mean, to me it's kind of more on the margins type of thing. If we're talking about a huge development, whatever, it doesn't matter. But if you're talking about adding a, I don't know, attached garage or shed, I don't know, just something that really shouldn't be that big a deal. It seems like something like this, I mean, I don't think $30 is gonna upset your project there, but something like this is just, I don't know, just seems like another process that in my mind, isn't necessarily needed and therefore should not be required. Maybe it could be offered as something to speed the process up. So if you want to pay 30 bucks, you had some assurances that your building permit review won't be screwed up, I don't know. But otherwise, it's kind of luck of the draw or whatever. Maybe something like that would be more palatable. I don't know how I feel about it. Understood, thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Gose. Commissioner Brain. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I share Commissioner Johnson's concern about the short fuse that seems to be attached to this because when I think of some of the work that's gone on in my neighborhood and how slowly it's progressed from one reason or another money being one example of why things were slow, I think people would have been coming back more than once or twice to renew.  Sure, Commissioner Brain, yeah, we appreciate that. We're certainly open to extending that timeframe for sure. If the commission has a recommendation, we'll certainly take it under consideration. Thank you. Commissioner Harris. I guess I'm hung up on the name, Zoning Permit, and you're not requesting a change in zoning. I mean, if I'm building a deck on my house, I'm not gonna change this, I don't so why zoning? Yeah, well, it kind of captures a couple of different things. So again, this permit will capture residential development as well as non-residential development. So perhaps the name, I think we looked at it as, as we discussed earlier, almost a cantor zoning verification. So you're not changing anything through that, you're just verifying what's there. So that's what this permit will be doing. It's more like a verification in regards to what the zoning code will allow you to do. Okay, so you're verifying whether or not I can do what I plan to do. Project feasibility. 10,000 square foot home, I wanna add 20,000 square feet to it. So yes, you wanna allow me to do that. Yes, sir. Commissioner Miller. So I'm in favor of this. Other jurisdictions have been doing it for 50 years. It seems to me that it's in the community's best interest to make sure in some sort of orderly, regularized fashion that people don't get launched down financial stream and then find out that they've got a problem and it happens. It happens all the time in areas like where I live where no lot is conforming because they were made before we created the zoning that governs them. These things are complicated and you can't, and I'm sorry, I can't look it up online. I need the plane staff to help me. I can figure it out and I think I'm right, but I feel a lot better. When I've talked to somebody and they've looked at it and they've told me yes and that's a zoning permit, what I need is a piece of paper. I'm against the fee. We already charge for this review. It seems to me this is getting the general public online with a process to make the staff's life easier. The staff should be doing this. This is what we do when we regulate property. If you take the fee away, the three month term doesn't matter because if it runs out then you can get another one. I think the three month term is important because if I'm not mistaken under the statutes, a zoning permit would vest the zoning. I do not want to vest zoning for long periods of time. If you get a one year zoning permit life, you could on day 364 apply for your building permit. Now the zoning permit doesn't matter anymore and now we're vested again. I do not want to have these legal hand ties on the community's ability to change the rules and affect future development. So a three month term as long as there is no fee or a nominal fee only is fine with me. I think this is something that we've needed to do for a long time so that ordinary citizens are not bouncing back and forth between departments or finding out that they've got a problem after they've started. And I know that you're tired of dealing with these things too and also compartmentalize that our building inspectors are building code and that our zoning people are zoning and it seems to me it just makes more sense because the review is happening. So let's make it, let's have it organized in tears and do it that way but I'm against the fee. And one of the reasons why I'm against the fee is this applies to little guys. The big guys are gonna go through site plan and that is their zoning permit process. The little guys, the guy who's going to build one house on one lot or is going to add to his property or build a deck, they are the only people who are gonna be paying this and I just don't wanna throw another nickel or another dime onto his cost. Let him pay for the building permit, the city gets that money, that's all but the zoning check needs to come first and when he goes and he says I need a building permit and they said first you need to go get your zoning permit. Okay and I can see the face is falling and then they find out well we'll have this back to you within a certain number of days and it doesn't cost anything then all of a sudden he's feeling better and his project is safer going forward. So I'm all for this, I am against the fee, I have a question. So what you're asking us to pass is the statutory provisions that set up the fee procedure and this would be in article three of the code. It doesn't have anything to do with the fee. I mean with the process, this is the procedure. The fee comes somewhere else in some business that doesn't come to us and I know that at certain intervals during the year at least once you have a thing where you ask the JCC, I never could get that to this, JCC, yeah whatever it is, yes those guys to look at it and then it goes to the bodies and that and that I suppose would be the place where I would object to this fee except for that I'm going to support this but I'm going to make it clear in my comments that I'm against there being any fee to it. I would feel differently if this was a few more dollars on the people who can afford to pay for it but for most people, and this includes me and maybe I am wrong to project my own experience onto other people, when I have looked at the few projects that I have done on my own property, every penny matters and we have already used the complicated nature of our zoning code and I'm not advocating going back. It tends to alienate ordinary people from this process and the fees certainly do. If an ordinary person wants to come up and apply for rezoning, that's a lot of money to gamble especially since if they're not even in the market if they want to make some small change to the zoning to protect their property but not necessarily as a commercial enterprise to make money, we have shut them out. I think of all the work that I did 40 years ago in rezonings throughout Durham where the fee was 19 bucks and that was neighborhood initiated. Well, that's over now and I'm against this $30 fee. I'm against a $10 fee. I suppose it was $5, I would quit quibbling but even $30 I'm against and if you take the fee away then the fact that it's a short period on the life of the permit doesn't matter because then you can go apply for another one. So that's how I feel about it and I encourage you folks whether you like the fee or not I think that it's time for Durham to do this. Other communities have done it literally for 50 years and when you read the zoning statutes at the General Assembly and they actually think that everybody does this because it's written in there. We don't, we should. Commissioner Van. Yeah, that was, well, I don't think Commissioner Miller that was actually one of the questions I guess I had. I was trying to look at comparables because I assume as you thought up this idea that you assume you looked at other municipalities of a similar size or a sister size to this city. And so, and I was just wondering, who are they, who are IPs, or who would be IPs rather if this matter moved forward? I mean, I mean. Which borrows from most jurisdictions, I would echo what Commissioner Miller has said, most jurisdictions in the state have some version of this regardless of size. I can speak from my own personal experience in previous jurisdictions I worked for that were on a smaller scale than Durham. Yeah, this was the norm. If you wanted to build something you would go get your zoning permit and then you would proceed or whatever they called it and then you would proceed to the building inspections stage at that point. So I would say, I mean, I don't have the numbers in front of me but I think a majority of the municipalities in North Carolina approach it this way. And have they found how effective this has been? Is there any idea as to impact or? I mean, I would think so because it appears more jurisdictions such as Durham is trying to have that way during the review and understanding or in thinking of this process. I guess you have to go on with this. Yeah, I mean, we certainly reached out to them and we feel based on what we've seen or heard from our peer communities as well as just looking internally at how our processes between the inspection department and planning department have worked over the last 20 years or so that we think this is probably a step in the right direction for both internal city staff as well as the public as well. Okay, thank you very much. Yes, sir. Commissioner Johnson. All right, so we've created a belong of the legal conversation around this but I think it's important to have this conversation. So in regards to staff, I'm gonna assume that the goal here is to create a win-win outcome for both the local agency as well as the end user, the one who's applying for the zoning permit or however we call it. So to follow up on Commissioner Miller's point of about the fee, he doesn't agree with the fee but he does agree that this should be a part of the standard process. If we assume that basic fundamental economic incentive, the whole idea around incentive. So introducing a cost would, one would say in theory, it would lead to likely a reduction in the number of people applying for a building permit if you have to have the zoning permit first because now you have an additional cost. So the outcome could be we have less residents in Durham who's applying for these building permits and because of the zoning. The flip side is that there's revenue that can be generated because now you've instituted a cost and we don't know what the impact will be on the demand for the services. So in trying to find a middle ground from Commissioner Miller's proposition of getting the, not charging a fee but we still institute this from a process standpoint, could it be a way that we allow residents to actually opt in and the city can guarantee or give a pretty firm timeframe of when a free, no charge, well, let's not call it, a no charge to the applicant, they will get a decision regarding this zoning approval or certification, no cost. But then there's an option for expedited that allows the big developers who is not gonna impact their project as my commissioners have, my fellow commissioners had noted, but maybe a pocketbook issue for the average or regular Dermite that they can have the standard, you know, net neutrality, let's call it what we're having at the federal level, but residents may be more inclined to accept that, oh, I'll get my decision in 30 days versus I can pay more than $30 to get an expedited option and that creates a win-win where now we have a process, a process in place, but then we account for the fact that you all have to take the time to do it and that's not free and we're probably not gonna get an expanded budget at the local level for you to get more people, but now there's a way to potentially cover some of the costs of doing that, you know, expedited or workable at night. Just a thought. Thank you. Commissioner Bryan. Listening to comments, it's obvious Commissioner Miller knows about the use of the zoning permits and other jurisdictions and it's also obvious that staff has done some research to see what other jurisdictions are doing. So that leads to a question I probably should have asked earlier. From based on your knowledge and the research, what is the typical timeframe for a zoning permit and other jurisdictions? I can't speak to other jurisdictions. I think it varies depending on the size. It can be a couple of days, sometimes in places it can do it same day. It can be as much as a week. We are shooting for roughly about three business days to review these. No, but okay, but how long are they good for? Oh, life of the permit. Life of the permit. So we actually looked at this text amendment from the city of Asheville. And so that's what we based it off. They're crazy. Any control on left? And a second question in looking at other jurisdictions, Asheville or anywhere else, what about costs? We are very cost comparison. I mean, if we compare, I think we're about the same. We may even be less. Typically all of our development costs have been low compared to Charlotte and Raleigh in places like that for construction drawings and et cetera. And so actually our director and manager already have a fee schedule that they've started the process with, with city council, which includes this in there. They're not here and I haven't been to any of those meetings so I don't know where that stands. All right. Jacob Wiggins playing part, just to clarify that point. So the all planning fees are set by city council and the board of county commissioners. So it's part of this year's budget. This item is noted as part of that for the $30 fee for the upcoming fiscal year. So it's gonna be part of the budget decision and later this month. Correct. Yes, sir. Like next week. Yes, sir. Get your comments in quick. Mr. Brian, any additional comments? And I'll just note that this was heard at last week's joint city county planning committee meeting and my personal opinion is I also have some thoughts about the fee and the level of the fee, Commissioner Johnson. I think you've raised a really interesting point that's worth considering as well as the timeframe. So I'm gonna plan to vote to approve but put those comments in my notes for the governing body to consider. Yeah, and Commissioner, I'm sorry. Chair Busby, I would just echo that. We've heard some good suggestions in terms of the time and the fee is a little bit out of staff's control at this point, but I think those are all very valid comments. And this is something obviously we'll continue to evaluate each year as part of our work program. Great, thank you. Seeing no other comments or questions. This is the... Did you work all the way down? I believe so. I believe anyone have any remaining questions or comments and if not, I will take a motion for approval. Mr. Chairman, I move that we send TC 1-800-004 forward to the governing bodies with a favorable recommendation. Second. Moved by Commissioner Bryan, seconded. Was that Commissioner Ghosh? Who seconded? Who threw their voice? Commissioner Alturk, well done. All those in favor, please say aye. I'd like to debate the motion if I may. You may. I would like for us, at least to consider sending a, modifying that a little bit by saying that we oppose the fee if that's in fact the way we feel together. And I would ask the maker of the motion and just second to consider whether or not they would consider modifying it that way. And I will also throw out that if you don't wanna do that then I'm still gonna vote in favor of this. And then we can have our several odd comments. But I think that our advice to the governing boards might be a little bit more powerful if we could come together on the fee question. Commissioner Bryan. I don't have any objection to modifying the motion to say that we also recommend that there be no fee. But to a certain extent that hangs me up because I'd also like to stick in there that would have a longer time period from the validity of the permit. So. And Mr. Chairman, if I may, I understand that one. We just go ahead like we are and we can make other individual comments. Okay. So we're back to thank you. We're back to the original motion of approval to send forward to the governing bodies noting that everyone has the opportunity to make their individual comments. All those in favor of approval, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Aye. For the record, Commissioner Johnson was the name? Great. Oh, two nays. Commissioner Johnson and Al Turk voted no. The motion still carries. Nine to two. Nine to two. That was our final official item. We have two unofficial quick items for, they're very official. So first for commissioners Gosh and Bryan, we have your county certificates of appreciation for your service. So congratulations to both of you. The other county commissioners, I believe were given these certificates at the annual appreciation gathering for the county appointees. I will hand these to you in a moment. In addition, we will officially celebrate next month with our always will be the chair to me. When I joined, David Harris was the chair of the planning commission. And this is his final meeting with us as he has term limited. And so I think it's well worth us spending a few minutes now. I know I will miss next month's meeting. So I won't have the pleasure of giving you the well earned proclamation, but I'm gonna start and just say thank you so much for your service. Again, when I joined, I learned a ton from you because you were the chair when I came on this commission. So I was in watch and learn mode and we really appreciate your hard work, your dedication, your insightful questions. I know you're still very active in Durham. So I'm looking forward to seeing you in other capacities, but I really appreciate your service and we're gonna miss having you here. I appreciate those kind words, but $30 a hell. Yeah. My comments last for 90 days. That's right. I opened the floor for any other commissioners. I just staff just wants to clarify, well, Mr. Harris be available to come to the next meeting. So we would like to put that item on the agenda and have you recognize it. I've been told to be here. All right, great. We'll make sure it's on the agenda. Any other comments from commissioners? I would like to suggest that if we put Mr. Harris on the agenda that we put him at the top of the agenda. So that, you know. No, no, no. Mr. Clarification, we have to order it due to by the rules of procedure, but staff will ask for an adjustment to move it to the front. Of course, we're not gonna ask for the whole meeting. Don't expect me to vote for that. Top of our heart, top of the agenda. That's exactly right, exactly right. You know, this was a six-third of meeting in that. We were to be out here at six-third. I'm sorry I asked so many questions. All right, with that, again, we thank you, Commissioner Harris and this meeting is adjourned.


Ne, dve fleče, vandine. kako ga welim tudi, ki ležite tudi o jebno da ne laheli. Tukaj ležite, ko je zvonil, kako so venkne za mosti srati 3 večne zebra,张 je in svanje, enfesijadi in sklepo. In včasno izvang, pristajte, ki dejem tudi to pričaj in Sloka SE, ki imam z給ve o dragi, ki je s leadom nekaj, ki dejem tudi tukaj. Tukaj lahel, pa sem izbojila.  Prišli ljub, da je saj Sergej, Zelo je imeljno bilo, da odrečno kar je našli in izvah vzgladova s teba in našli izvah vsak z naspevaj del anti taj našli našli našli in našli za taj našli, ki je pravda taj našli za taj našli našli.  In je zelo prišel, je tudi nekaj neč tako izvaj, in je se pristila, že je jevanje, odstavila ki pri 07 m. 11.2012, in foreign elections, postanešte zelo vament i tudi v poločanje. In zelo tega evolutja je vsega izgleda, da je preformačna, da tega netvora so podetva v zelo, in tazda je, za čem tudi na imezne netve, je zelo kratko in veliko. In tudi tega netvora se pripravila možnosti in tudi vsega imezne netva. Proste, da so pripravili o zelo, in povedeščke vse, ki so odlišili, od sva povedečenja, in večo infekcije ispešcije in zelo in hvala nač unexpected, tačno je nekaj dolocil nekaj biologični sistem. Also, mankist, rodin a z nimi ne kaj je jazama malja način. Veselim o tajh njačin, ker je uženja ovedajoskjenja, da je to nožite. Priježemo vzelo, da nekaj je svoju ataknowenje z nekaj je, jazma, Makak, da je je vse našlič. Zato, da se pristajemo na zelo pozavljenju, da vse je ovo semialitistje vzelo sezivnih vzela in zelo, da je to da je všeč, da so semialitistje, nekaj na večenih raznega in zelo, da je to je od pozavljenja in od pozavljenja in od pozavljenja komputation, ki se početili, pa je unicina na zelo. Zelo, da je to večel nesega za to, ki je z vsega na prijeva Jim De Carlo, bo še je sečeno, da je to nekaj, nekaj ni nakrepo, are similarity between the structures of the system. In the brain, we have different visual areas. Visual areas are made of neurons. The neurons are the computational units in the brain, and individual systems they perform computation, which are kind of similar to what we find in the net. There are filtering operations, thresholding, normalization, pooling. And in terms of architecture, what we can see is that when it comes to object recognition, this function is mediated by a hierarchy of visual areas that start in the retina, and then keeps going across the agent and then arrive to primary visual cortex, v1. And then it keeps going through a sequence of cortical stages, v2, v4, and then the infotemporal cortex, which form the so-called venus stream. The venus stream is the pathway that in the brain is processing object information, shape information, and these underlying object recognition. And so, talking about object recognition, I think it is very important to understand what is the key challenge in this task, both for an artificial or for a biological system. And the key challenge is to achieve invariance, and I can easily state this with a very simple cartoon. So if I have to recognize, for example, this target, this car, I need to be able to discriminate it from any other object I may find in the world, right? But at the same time, this is just one of the main images that this object can project on my retina, the car can appear under different poses, positions, translations, backgrounds. I need to understand that this is always my target, just transformed. So the visual system must be able to be sensitive to changes in the identity of the object, but insensitive to transformations of the object. It may be invariant to such transformations. And understanding how object identity is somehow factor out from these other confounding factors is actually one of the key challenges in visual science, but also nowadays in machine learning, where we try to understand how deep network works, right? And they say that we don't really have a final answer to this question. I mean, we don't really know exactly how the brain is able to achieve this, but we don't even know how the deep networks exactly are able to achieve this, why they work so well, right? But as a neuroscientist, as a neurophysiologist, we can put out some ideas based on the many decades of investigation of these systems. And I think these ideas can be summarized in our overall hypothesis that is, I think, nicely depicted in this opinion paper that was written by Gene DeKal and David Cox back in 2007. So I'm going to show you now a few pictures taken from this paper, and these pictures are based on simulations that Dave performed at the time. But keep in mind that these simulations are actually based on known tuning properties of visual neurons in the ventral stream. So what is going on here is that if you look at the retina, the input layer of the visual system, and you look at how two objects, let's say two faces, Joe and Sam, are represented in the space defined by the activations of the neurons in the retina, well, this representation will be too many folds which are highly curved and highly intertwined between each other, very much tangled. When you move onward along the ventral stream and you arrive, for example, to V1, this manifold will still be quite tangled and quite curved, a little bit less, because V1 has developed a better specificity for visual features. So in V1 we have neurons that are edged detectors and also have gained some amount, a little amount of position in variance, for example. But when you arrive at the apex of this hierarchy, at the anterior part of the inferior temporal cortex, then the manifold would have become much flatter, much less tangled, and as a consequence, it's possible to linearly separate them using simple linear classifier. So you can place a hyperplane here and tease apart these two object categories. So this is, we can call it the untangling hypothesis, and we can kind of generalize this idea, which is present in neuroscience, also to machine learning, and in this case we can consider that the input space, of course, is the pixel space, the output space can be considered as the last hidden layer space, and the object and the untangling hypothesis, what it states is that the object manifold become less tangled, they become fluttered, and also they become lower dimensional because, of course, they become influttered, and occupy less volume of the embedding space. Now, I'm calling this hypothesis because some of what I'm saying here is actually quite well established. For example, it is known in neuroscience that, in fact, if you read out the representation of objects in the last part of the inferior temporal cortex, these representation are, in fact, linearly separable. So you can actually read out very easily the identity of objects from the population activity of inferior temporal neurons using simple linear classifier. So the representation are, in fact, less tangled. And the same is kind of true for deep nets, right? I mean, the fact that they work so well is because at the last layer, not the softmax layer, they are separating very nicely the representation of different manifolds. But what is not really so clear is whether they actually fluttered. So if this untangling happens actually because there is a fluttering on the underlying manifold and if it is actually a reduction in dimensionality.  And we focus especially on the dimensionality. So our goal was to track the intrinsic dimension of image representations across the layers of deep networks. And our experimental design was the following. We took a various state-of-the-art deep networks, AlexNet, VGG, VGG with batch normalization and ResNet. And then we estimated the intrinsic dimension in a subset of checkpoint layers. These were the input and output layers, the pooling layers following a convolutional layer or a stack of convolutional layers, or in the case of ResNet, a ResNet block, and the fully connected layers. And the equation we asked were, how does the intrinsic dimension vary across the layers of these deep nets? How linear or flat are the data manifolds? And whether there is any relationship between the intrinsic dimension in the last hidden layer and the performance that the network can actually achieve. So, of course, in order to do this, we need a way to estimate the intrinsic dimension of this data manifold. And the intrinsic dimension can be defined as the minimal number of variables or coordinates that you need to describe your data points without significant information loss. Now, if the data live in a linear subspace over a hyperplane, this estimation is quite easy. We all know that we can use principle component analysis, and we can see this in this simple cartoon. If my data live in a two-dimensional embedding space, but they actually stretch out along the line, I can compute the principle component of the covariance matrix, and I can look which of these components are actually explained in most of the variance. I can throw away the component which is not really explained in much variance, and I keep the others. And so I will figure out that this is actually a representation that live in a one-dimensional subspace. But the problem is how to do the same when the data actually live in no linear manifold, which is not the general case. So, in this case, there are some other approaches to computing intrinsic dimension. What we used was an approach that was recently developed by the group of Alessandro Lajo in describing this paper here, FACCO et al., 2017. And let me just describe how this works. So, suppose that you have, in fact, data living in this, let's say, one-dimensional manifold. What you can do, you can go through all the points. As I said, you start from point i, and then you compute a distance between these points and its first and second nearest neighborhood. And then you compute the ratio between these two distances, r2 over r1. And you obtain this variable mu, mu i, because you do this for all the points in your data set. And what Alessandro has shown is that this variable is distributed according to operator distribution that does not depend on the local density of the points, but does depend on the intrinsic dimension of the data, or the data manifold. So, one can simply compute the distribution of mu from the empirical data and then can estimate d, the intrinsic dimension. And something which is quite nice is that one can run a scale analysis because it has been shown that the idea estimates, so the estimation of the intrinsic dimension is robust if it is scale invariant. So, this means that we should compute d as a function of the number of data points, and then if we observe a plateau in this relationship between d and n, then we can trust the estimate of d. And just to show you a couple of examples from this paper of Fakotal, these are simulated data living on a hyperplane, a two-dimensional hyperplane embedded in a 20-dimensional space, and there is Gaussian noise added to this data, so to make them spread around a little bit, and sigma is giving the amplitude of this noise. And so, when you do this scale analysis, you can see that d is changing the function of n, but there is a region of n in which the estimate is very stable and this estimate is actually 2, which is the actual dimension of the data here. And these apply not only to the linear case, but also to nonlinear cases like this in which actually Gaussian was wrapped around the whip roll, as whip roll, again with addition of Gaussian noise. As you can see, there is a tendency for d to increase while you get more data, you are kind of filling up the volume of your embedded space, but there is a region where d is very stable, it is flat, and this corresponds to the actual value of the embedded dimension, sorry, on the intersting dimension, which is 2. So, we use this approach to systematically track the dimensionality of representation in deep networks. So, we started in our experiment with the VGG 16, which is a quite standard benchmark in the field of machine learning now, I mean, can achieve very good performances. And this was downloaded on PyTorch and pre-trained, it was already pre-trained with ImageNet, but then when we looked at the representation of the data manifold, we didn't use the ImageNet images, we actually used another set of images that come from our new official logic paper that we bought last year, actually this year. And these objects are computer graphics models, 40 computer graphic models. As you can see, they are quite realistic objects, and they are rendered in 36 different views. So, for example, you can see here the 36 views of the starfish. And the total of images is 1,400, 40. So, why did we start with this object set? Because we wanted, in our first exploration, to kind of contain a little bit the viability of the complexity also of visual features in the data set. So, these are still very complex objects, but they are black and white, they are actually, they are grayscale, they don't have background, they have a little bit, the span is a little bit less widely in the image space. And what we did, we took VGG 16, as I said, portraying, but we fine tuned the last few layers of the network so that it was performing very well on this classification task, on these images. And then we look at the interesting dimension. What we found, again, by sampling these checkpoint layers, what we found, what these, I will say stereotypical, as I will show you later, a hunchback profile. So, the interesting dimension starts at a given point, then it grows quite substantially, and then it decreases monotonically to become quite small in the last hidden layers. And something that should be noticed here is that the intrinsic dimension is really much, much lower than the dimension of the band space. So, here, these numbers are telling you how many units there are in each layer in this network. So, for example, if you look here, we have 800,000 units, this means a 800,000 dimensional in band space, while the dimensionality is about 70, dimensionality of the actual manifold. And the same apply here in the last hidden layers. You can see that the dimensionality goes down to 7 or 6. So, it's very, very, very, very low dimensional. And we run the scaling variant analysis, of course, to check that our estimate of the intrinsic dimension was actually reliable, robust. So, this, of course, is just a small dataset and one architecture, VGG 16. After this first experiment, we wanted to test how systematic and how robust was this trend, this Hunchback profile that we found. So, we took a bunch of architectures and several instances of networks for each of these architecture. All-point train on ImageNet. And this time, we actually computed the intrinsic dimension for the seven most populated categories of ImageNet. So, there are a few object classes that contain a lot of samples. And we computed independently the intrinsic dimension for each of these classes using 500 images for each. And then we averaged the result. And this is what we get. So, we see, again, this trend that we saw before, this evolution of the idea with the stereotype pattern, which is this Hunchback shape. You see, an initial... So, the representation start to be quite low dimensional in the initial layer. Then it goes up and then it goes down. And also, again, the intrinsic dimension is much lower than embedded dimension. But you can also see here that it looks like that these different networks have really a similar trend and this would actually be almost identical if only they had the same number of layers. The fact is that these networks have a different number of layers. Like AlexNet has just nine layers, while ResNet 34 has 34 layers. We can plot these same curves on a normalized layer depth. So, we can plot them as a function of an index which tells the relative depth of the layer. So, how distant is the layer from the output, let's say. And what we found is that surprisingly, all these curves kind of collapse on a single profile, right? With the exception of AlexNet, the other networks are kind of having a peak more or less in the same range of relative depth between 0.20 and 0.4. Then they fall down quite with the same slope, although there is a little bit difference between the ResNet family and the VGG family. So, there is a considerable overlap between this profile and the conclusion would be that after an initial go, or the intrinsic dimension, the deep networks perform a progressive dimensionality reduction of the object manifold. No, yeah, there are differences, right? I kind of show this here if you look at the picture of VGG. So, there is actually an alternation of different kind of processing layer. So, you have convolutional layers pooling, then you have fully connected, right? Then you have softmax. So, each network, of course, is on architecture. What we try to do, we try to standardize the checkpoints layer for which we took our measurement and these were the input and output, but then we kind of targeted the pooling layer after a spark of convolutional layers. And then, finally, the fully connected layers. And this can be done in all the architecture that we have investigated. So, there are other questions? No, no, no, I will come back later to this because we have some intuition about why there is such a trend and I will kind of give some idea later. And so, coming back to this trend here, right? One can wonder at this point if the dimensionality of the representation, especially the one reached in the last hidden layer, has anything to do then with how good the network is, with how good is the classification of QSC that the network can achieve, right? So, we tested this and, again, we used the same architecture, again, pre-trained image net. In this case, we used a random issue of 2,000 trained images, taken randomly from ImageNet to compute the increasing dimension and then we compare it to the classification of the QSC as the top five score error provided by PyTorch when you download the net, right? And this is what we found. There is a very strong and clear linear relationship between the intensity dimension and the error rate of the network. So, the lowest is the intensity dimension that is achieved in the last layer, in the last hidden layer. The lower is the error rate. So, the relationship is very much linear, very strongly correlation. And this applies not only when you pull together all the different architecture, but also within a single architecture. For example, if you just focus on a raised net, we can see this very strong linear relationship between performance of the network and the dimensionality in the last hidden layer. So, we can kind of conclude from this. Now, something important is that while the error is computed on the test images, okay, our estimate of the ID was supposedly performed over the training set. So, which means that somehow the intensity dimension over the training set is a strong predictor of the performance of the network on the test set. So, somehow the intensity dimension can be taken as a proxy for the generalizational ability of the network. So, coming back to our original hypothesis, we can kind of say that, yes, there is, in fact, a decrease of dimensionality. It looks like these networks are trying to compress the dimensionality into the representation, but we should keep in mind that there is also this initial expansion that will come back to that later. But of course, the main equation of whether these manifolds are also becoming flatter, more linear. So, this is still an opening question and we wanted to target this. And of course, there are different ways to do this. You can actually try to measure the curvature of manifolds. There are some geometrical approaches to do this, but you can also exploit the estimation of the dimensionality because, for example, in a linear case like this, the dimensionality estimate yielded by PCA should be equal to the dimensionality estimate yielded by our estimator 2 and n. And actually, this is something that Alessandro groups are shown. If you have data that lives in a linear subspace, his estimator is just returning the same value that is returned by PCA. But in the case in which, this is not true, the case in which the data lives in a nonlinear manifold, in general, PCA would actually put much overestimate the actual intrinsic dimension because it would not be able to capture, I mean, to see the underlying structure of the data. We see that the data are filling a big chunk of space, a big volume. And so, what you should expect is that if the manifold is nonlinear, there would be a big difference between the two estimates. So, and the linear estimate with PCA should be much, much larger than the estimate that you get from 2 and n. And so, what we did, we took our architectures, we performed PCA on the last, this is an example on the last hidden layer. And we rank-ordered the spectrum of eigenvalues according to the magnitude. And what you can see immediately is that there is a very smooth variation of the magnitude of the eigenvalue as a function of the rank, right? So, we do not really see a gap in the spectrum of eigenvalues which by itself is an indication that this manifold is probably not linear, right? We should expect to see just a few components captured in most of the data if the data live in a linear subspace. And so, then data manifold already do not appear to be linear just based on looking at the spectrum of eigenvalues. But you can still define an intrinsic dimension based on PCA as the number of principal components that's account for 90% of the variance in the data set. This is something that people have done in the past, right? And then you can compare this estimate of intrinsic dimension over the one yielded by our argument, by 2nn. And so, these are the trends that we get across the layer of a deep net. This is VGG 16. And this is the same plot that I showed you before the Hunchback profile in the case of 2nn. This is what you get with PCA. As you can see that, first of all, there is a big difference in terms of magnitude. So, the estimate yielded by PCA is at least four times larger here. But the shape is also very different. There is basically just a flat plateau. And although there is a little bit of decrease of the dimensionality toward the last hidden layer, still the dimensionality here remains very high. It's about 100 that you remember here. It was, I think, 10. So, it is at least 10 times larger than what we got with our method. So, this is what is happening. But also, it is interesting to compare this profile for train network with what you get for untrained networks. So, this is a network in which we simply take random initialization of the weights. We do not train them. But we can still feed images to the network and see how is the dimensionality or the representation of these images. And what you see is that in the case of the estimation yielded by PCA, there is no much difference between this curve. So, it is just a little bit lower, but it is almost like if it is just shifted over a few tenths of dimensions. While it is very different, the profile that you get would turn in. So, in this case, you don't get anymore the hunchback shape. You simply get almost a flat trend of the intrinsic dimension, which is something that you should expect because if you just have a unit that are applying to the input, a random linear weighting sum, what you are basically doing is simply a rotation of this vector in the input space. So, the structure or the representation is not changing. You are performing a sort of orthogonal transformation. And so, you should expect that the intrinsic dimension remain the same. And so, taken together, all these analysis seem to point to the fact that the data manifold, oh, sorry. Let me see if it is going to start. Oh, okay. Sorry, guys, but the point collapsed. Let's try to get it back into shape. Okay, so I think it should be working again. Yeah, so what I was trying to say is that, I mean, we can conclude from this that the data manifolds become lower dimensional, but they don't appear to become much more linear. So they still live on curved surfaces. So, when we come to this hypothesis here, it looks like, at least in deep nets, they don't really become flatter, no, these data representations. So, just to conclude my presentation, I just want to point out to one another thing. No, this initial increase that we see, this expansion of the intrinsic dimension that we see from the input layer to the first hidden layers, right? We wanted to try to figure out what is the reason of this. And we had a very simple intuition. So, if you look at these images, right? If you look at a dataset like ImageNet, you can see that these images are super complex. They contain a lot of features, but these features are also low-level features. Just think about the color, the hue, the luminosity, the contrast, the textures. So, these features can impose gradients over the image set. And these gradients may actually be correlated with each other. For example, luminosity may somehow be correlated with some specific hue or the color or a contrast. So, what is going to happen, probably, is that these strong trend, the strong gradient or low-level features are squeezing the representation in the input layer to live over a rather low-dimensional space, because this is what we see here, right? All the representations, I mean, for all the networks, the representation starts living in a very low-dimensional space. And so, what could happen is that the network is actually trying to remove these low-level features, this correlation in the data. And this is why there is this initial expirience. So, to verify this, we ran an experiment with a simple network. Just shown here, it is just based on two convolutional layers, two pooling layers, one fully connected and one output layer. And we used, as a dataset, a something much simpler, this amnist image set of handwritten digits. As you can see here, we don't have any crazy background. The background is just black. The digits are just white. So, these are very simple images, quite standardized, right? There are no gradients of low-level features here. So, we can train the network to classify these digits. Of course, the network can achieve very large performances. Then we can compute the intrinsic dimension. And what we see is that, oh, sorry, there is no any longer the initial increase of the dimensionality. So, the dimensionality starts high, and then it just keeps decreasing monotonically. So, again, what we think is happening here is that differently from this kind of dataset, where we have, for example, that, you know, if you look at walking dogs, well, they typically are on grass. So, there is a lot of green, like husky over a background that contains north. It is a lot of white. Here, the sailing boat is a lot of blue. There are sea. So, these gradients of low-level features probably are responsible for projecting the data on this low dimension. So, how can we test this with our dataset? Well, very simply, we can take our MNIST original dataset and we can add randomly alumina's background. So, we can impose alumina's gradient over this transformed MNIST dataset. So, you can imagine that now what we are going to do is taking all these images that are living in a cloud, right? And then we are kind of stretching this cloud along a line, which is the one imposed by the gradient luminosity. So, when we try the network over these images and we look at the dimensionality, this is what is happening. So, the dimensionality is expected to start from a much lower value in the input layer. And then the network is actually taking a few steps to increase the dimensionality before it starts decreasing it again. So, this kind of reminiscent of the hunchback profile that we saw before. And so, our interpretation of this hunchback profile is that there is this need by the network to initially get rid of these low-level features. And here, as you said, I mean, I'm a neuroscientist. I just want to make a quick connection to physiology. So, just to summarize, it looks like that in a train network the initial expansion of the intrinsic dimension affects the pruning of low-level, highly correlated visual feature, which are not essential for the classification task. And this is a little reminiscent of a finding that we had a few years ago on rat visual cortex. So, let me just mention this quickly. So, here, in this study, we were investigating how visual objects are processed along this pathway, which you can consider it being the homologus of the venture stream in the rat brain. So, this is a sequence, a progression of visual areas named V1, LM, LI, and LL. And what we found is that if you look at the amount of information that individual neurons are conveying about the object identity, this steadily decreases across this pathway. But when you break down this information in two components, the components about the low-level information, the luminance of the visual input, and the higher-order information, you can see that actually this color part is quite preserved. In fact, it's not different from V1 to LL. But what is actually getting thrown away by this pathway is information about the luminosity. So, what we are kind of seeing here is something similar. So, it looks like both in the rat brain and in these nets, there is an initial processing. The initial layers are trying to, let's say, make the distribution of the data, let's say, spherical again before performing some further processing to classify properly this data. And so, now, I just want to show one last experiment that I'm done, which is again with amnist, which is also quite interesting because something that one can do is to take a dataset, set of images, and shuffle around with the labels. And, of course, if you do so, there is no consistent classification that the network can learn because to the category 5 it will belong digits that are not 5. It may happen that there is a 5, it may happen that there is a 1, it may happen that there is a 9 or whatever. But still, previous studies have shown that these networks are such a good learner that they can actually learn an arbitrary classification. So, actually, you can train the network that I showed you before and the network will achieve on the training data 90% or more correct performance, right? But, of course, there is no generalization that can be possibly done. So, we wanted to see what happens to the dimensionality in this case and what happened is shown here. So, in this case, the intensity dimension, rather than decreasing in the last layer, it jumps up, right? So, it seems that there is something specific in the decreased dimensionality that has to do with training a network on a generalizable dataset. If this is not the case, the dimensionality will simply go up, rather than go down. So, I'm done. I wanted also to point out that this finding is reminiscent of what other authors like Ma and colleagues have already reported in the literature. And just to sum up what I showed you, so, we found this highly stereotyped trend of intensity dimension across the layers of the net with this hunchback profile. We saw this very strong correlation between performance of the network and how small the intensity dimension in the last layer can be. We saw that even in spite of such compression on non-dimensionality, the data live still on non-linear manifolds. And we've seen that the initial expansion of the intensity dimension appear to be due to this process of discounting low-level information. And this can be depicted as a final take-home message in this join here, where we can see that in the input layer the data are kind of correlated between each other, so they live in this lower-dimensional manifold. In the initial layers are kind of making the distributions faker again, they throw away these correlations. But then they start mapping the representation into manifold that becomes increasingly lower-dimensionality. So, this is it. I just want to thank again the collaborators in the study, Alessandro, Jacob, and especially Alessio, which is also about to fly to Vancouver for presenting a poster about this work, a new episode. If you happen to be there, you can actually stop by him and ask him more technical details that I will not be able to answer. And I find some knowledge to the funding agency that allows me to support this work. Thanks.


Based here in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC, Lit City is part of the district's thriving gifting industry. Nine years ago, the city passed Initiative 71, making it legal to possess up to two ounces of marijuana for personal use. The law also created a loophole, allowing stores to gift their customers small amounts of weed, as long as they also buy another item, often at an exorbitant price, such as an 11-word motivational speech for $60 or a $95 Spider-Man sticker. We came up with a banging recipe for brownies. We named the brownies Ants College Fund Brownies, so you leave a donation, you can take a brownie, and it became such a hit because I was like, this is my son's College Fund Brownies, and this is what's going to put my son through college. Four years later, my son did graduate from Clark University and was the Massachusetts.