Inaugural Lecture: Sander Bohté

The Brain as a Computer

Is the brain a computer? These days, the brain is often explained in computer-terms. Your eyes sense and convey visual information to your brain, where the brain recognizes who or what you are seeing, and, if important enough, this information is stored.

We are then looking for smart rules that the computer uses to compute what actions to carry out in various circumstances, based on what we see, feel and hear, combined with learning and remembered information from the past. The assumption is that such smart rules exist, and that we can write them down in a compact and clear enough way for humans to understand.

How far along are we with understanding these computational principles? And what can we learn from recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, and then specifically Deep Learning? And what remains to be discovered?

In his inaugural lecture, Sander Bohté, professor of Cognitive Computational Neuroscience at UvA, will discuss these questions and more.

The lecture will be in Dutch.

About the Speaker

Sander Bohté is a senior researcher  in the CWI Machine Learning group, and full professor of Cognitive Computational Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Leiden University (2003) and has done research at CWI and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Sander is a pioneer in the development of advanced and efficient spiking neural networks, and recent work has also focused extensively on biologically plausible deep learning, including models that can learn from trial-and-error, deep reinforcement learning, and working memory tasks.

Details

Date: Wednesday 6th November 2019
Time: 16:00
Location: Auditorium – Old Lutherian Church, Singel 441, 1012XM, Amsterdam