Surprise! Computer Scientists Model the Exclamation Point Two Southern California engineers have created a mathematical theory of surprise, working from first principles of probability theory applied to a digital environment -- and the results of experiments recording eye movements of volunteers watching video seem to confirm it. Laurent Itti of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering and Pierre Baldi of the University of California Irvine's Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, will present their results December 7, at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference in Vancouver, B.C. Itti and Baldi went back to first principles in...