Domain-general cognition in brains and artificial neural networks

Event

In our next Researcher Live series, we will be focusing on ‘AI in Neuroscience’ – bringing you three fantastic speakers.

Join our first episode on 5th April at 4 pm BST / 3 pm GMT for a talk with Jascha Achterberg, PhD Student at University of Cambridge. Sign up here to receive email reminders for this series.

What are we going to talk about in this episode?

Humans’ ability for flexible domain-general cognition has long been of interest in neuroscience. We are extremely capable problem-solvers, able to quickly adapt to new environments and challenges. During the last decades neuroscience has made progress in understanding domain-general cognition in humans, highlighting a multimodal core brain network used to understand complex problems and generalise our skills across scenarios. Very recently, we have also seen astonishing progress in computer science, creating artificial neural network models which increasingly develop multimodal cognitive abilities. This opens the possibility to synergistically study domain-general cognition in both brains and artificial neural networks to undercover the computational mechanisms supporting abstract computations in both biological and artificial networks.

In this presentation, we will review the basics of domain-general cognition in the brain with a specific focus on how its systems-level architecture links to the neuronal codes facilitating abstract cognition. We will then compare this to current approaches for multimodal cognition in artificial neural networks. Ultimately, we will outline a path on how we can study biological and artificial systems side-by-side which will not only allow us to understand how domain-general cognition works but also how systems can achieve these computational capabilities while using minimal resources.

5th April, 4 pm BST – “Domain-general cognition in brains and artificial neural networks”, with Jascha Achterberg, PhD Student at Cambridge University.

6th April, 3 pm BST - "Predicting neurological disease severity using machine learning and brain connectomics", with Dr Ceren Tozlu, Weill Cornell Medicine.

18th April, 5 pm BST - TBC, with Dr Shahab Bakhtiari, University of Montreal.

Date and Time

Wednesday, April 5, 2023
03:00 pm GMT / 04:00 pm BST

Speakers

Jascha Achterberg

Jascha Achterberg is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, studying the connection of biological and artificial intelligence with the goal of identifying the core principles underlying domain-general cognition and multimodal computations in neural networks - may these be biological or artificial. The goal of this is not only to understand the principles of cognition but to also learn if and how these may inform innovations in hardware (neuromorphic computing chips) and software (network algorithms). He pursues these goals by using large scale electrophysiological, neuroimaging, and behavioural data, recorded in humans and non-human primates, to work out which features underlie highly functional brains and to then translate them into neuroscience-inspired artificial neural networks. Collaborating with partners across academia and industry (Intel Labs, Google DeepMind), he is passionate about large scale open-source collaborations bridging neuroscience and artificial intelligence (NeuroAI). In this effort Jascha is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through a Gates Cambridge scholarship.

DOI: 31IFp5LqfOxzbQavmsD9_prepost_3