From rim.assouel at gmail.com Fri Jul 19 09:44:29 2019 From: rim.assouel at gmail.com (Rim Assouel) Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2019 09:44:29 -0400 Subject: [Lisa_teatalk] [Tea Talk] Paul Cisek (Udem ) Fri 19 July 2019 10h30 Mila Agora In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Reminder : this is in 45min ! > On Jul 15, 2019, at 9:14 AM, Rim Assouel wrote: > > This week we have Paul Cisek from Udem giving a talk on Rethinking behavior from an evolutionary perspective at 10h30 in room Mila Agora. > > Will this talk be streamed  ? Yes > > Meeting with Paul : if you would like to meet with the speaker in the afternoon after the talk please fill this google form in ASAP : https://forms.gle/85xGyQMy2o3mHHFi9 > > > ############### > ####### > ### > # > > Non-Mila members mailing list : Reminder that a mailing list for non-mila people who would like to get tea talks notifications has been set up : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mila-teatalks > > Internal website : Tea Talks recordings are available here ( you need to sign in with your Mila account) : https://sites.google.com/lisa.iro.umontreal.ca/tea-talk-recordings/home?authuser=0 > > # > ### > ####### > ############### > See you there! > The Tea Talk Team > > TITLE Rethinking behavior from an evolutionary perspective > > ABSTRACT > In both AI research and psychological theory, the human brain is usually thought of as an information processing system that encodes and manipulates representations of knowledge to produce plans of action. This view leads to a decomposition of behavior into putative functions such as object recognition, memory, decision-making, action planning, etc., inspiring the search for the neural correlates of these functions and attempts to simulate them in computational models. However, empirical neurophysiological data does not support many of the predictions of these classic subdivisions, consistently showing divergence and broad distribution of putatively unified functions, “mixed representations” that combine sensory, motor, and cognitive variables in single neurons, and a general incompatibility with the conceptual subdivisions posited by psychological theories. In this talk, I will explore the possibility of resynthesizing a different set of functional subdivisions, guided by the growing body of data on the evolutionary process that produced the human brain. The main part of my talk will summarize, in chronological order, the sequence of innovations that appeared in nervous systems along the lineage that leads from the earliest multicellular animals to humans. Along the way, functional subdivisions and elaborations will be introduced in parallel with the neural specializations that made them possible, gradually building up an alternative conceptual taxonomy of brain functions. These functions emphasize mechanisms for real-time interaction with the world, rather than for building explicit knowledge of the world, and the relevant representations emphasize pragmatic outcomes rather than decoding accuracy, mixing variables in just the way seen in real neural data. I will argue that this alternative taxonomy better delineates the real functional pieces into which the human brain is organized, offers a more natural mapping to real neural structures, and provides a better set of constraints for constructing artificial systems aimed at replicating brain function > > BIO > Paul Cisek was born in Poland and emigrated to the US as a child. While he was originally trained in computer science and artificial intelligence, he became more interested in natural intelligence and enrolled in graduate studies under the supervision of Stephen Grossberg and Daniel Bullock and Boston University, obtaining a PhD in computational neuroscience. He then became interested in empirical neuroscience, and joined the laboratories of Stephen Scott and John Kalaska to study the processes of selection, planning, and control of actions by recording neural activity in the cerebral cortex of monkeys. Since then, he has established his own laboratory at the University of Montreal, in which he combines all of these techniques to investigate the cortical and subcortical mechanisms controlling our interactions with the world. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: