Coast to Coast Seminar Series: "Real Intelligence: The Anticipating Brain"
11:30 - 12:30
Rm10900
Dr. Thomas Trappenberg
Dalhousie University
Abstract
The area of AI was always inspired by the human mind. I will try to give some perspective of new directions in AI from new hypothesis about cognitive processes and neuroscience. Huge progress has been made in the scientific areas of neuroscience on one side and machine learning on the other, but it seems that these areas developed largely independently since the exciting days of the perceptron half a century ago. However, there is now some exciting new convergence of these areas of research. In particular, generative systems have made a strong impact on machine learning, and probabilistic reasoning replaced most of traditional expert-system approaches. This seminar will explore related new developments in computational neuroscience, specifically systems with a large top-down component that are capable of learning to anticipate the world. We further discuss representations of uncertainties in the brain and how synaptic mechanisms may contribute in such systems.
About the Speaker
Dr. Thomas Trappenberg is professor of computer science at Dalhousie University. After graduating with a PhD in particle physics from Aachen University, Germany, he held research positions at Dalhousie University, the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan, and at Oxford University. He is the author of more than 60 scientific publications and author of the textbook `Fundamentals of Computational Neuroscience', published by Oxford University Press, of which the second edition is about to be released.
