Brains, Minds and Machines

Spotlight on Science Meetings, Conferences and Events brings you information on the following: Brains, Minds and Machines to be held on 8/13/17 - 9/3/17

The goal of this course is to help produce a community of leaders that is equally knowledgeable in neuroscience, cognitive science, and computer science and will lead the development of true biologically inspired AI.

The class discussions will cover a range of topics, including:

• Neuroscience: neurons and models
• Computational vision
• Biological vision
• Machine learning
• Bayesian inference
• Planning and motor control
• Memory
• Social cognition
• Inverse problems & well-posedness
• Audition and speech processing
• Natural language processing

These discussions will be complemented in the first week by MathCamps and NeuroCamps, to refresh the necessary background. Throughout the course, students will participate in workshops and tutorials to gain hands-on experience with these topics.

Core presentations will be given jointly by neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and computer scientists. Lectures will be followed by afternoons of computational labs, with additional evening research seminars. To reinforce the theme of collaboration between (computer science + math) and (neuroscience + cognitive science), exercises and projects often will be performed in teams that combine students with both backgrounds.

The course will culminate with student presentations of their projects. These projects provide the opportunity for students to work closely with the resident faculty, to develop ideas that grow out of the lectures and seminars, and to connect these ideas with problems from the students’ own research at their home institutions.

This course aims to cross-educate computer engineers and neuroscientists; it is appropriate for graduate students, postdocs, and faculty in computer science or neuroscience. Students are expected to have a strong background in one discipline (such as neurobiology, physics, engineering, and mathematics). Our goal is to develop the science and the technology of intelligence and to help train a new generation of scientists that will leverage the progress in neuroscience, cognitive science, and computer science. The course is limited to 30 students.