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Events

Upcoming Events

  • image of language bubbles on orange background

    Mission Update - Language

    Date: March 19, 2024 | 4pm EST
    Location: Quest Conference Room, 45-792
    Large language models are fundamental building blocks in many modern AI systems—for language processing, as well as robotics, computer vision, software engineering, and more. For models trained on text to be useful for general AI and scientific applications, they must understand not just the structure of language, but the structure of the world; moreover, their language, reasoning, and world knowledge capabilities must align with those in humans.
  • photo of Giorgio Metta

    Quest | CBMM Seminar Series - Giorgio Metta

    Date: March 26, 2024 | 4pm EST
    Location: Singleton Auditorium, Building 46
    The iCub is a humanoid robot designed to support research in embodied AI. At 104 cm tall, the iCub has the size of a five-year-old child. It can crawl on all fours, walk, and sit up to manipulate objects. Its hands have been designed to support sophisticate manipulation skills. The iCub is distributed as Open Source following the GPL licenses (http://www.iCub.org). More than 50 robots have been built so far which are available in laboratories across Europe, US, Korea, Singapore, and Japan.
  • photo of Melanie Mitchel

    Quest | CBMM Seminar Series - Melanie Mitchel

    Date: April 2, 2024 | 4pm EST
    Location: Singleton Auditorium, Building 46
    Mitchell will survey a current, heated debate in the AI research community on whether large pre-trained language models can be said to "understand" language—and the physical and social situations language encodes—in any important sense. She will describe arguments that have been made for and against such understanding, and, more generally, will discuss what methods can be used to fairly evaluate understanding and intelligence in AI systems.
  • Mission Update - Embodied Intelligence

    Date: April 9, 2024 | 4pm EST
    Location: Quest Conference Room, 45-792
    This research mission broadly addresses how we perceive the world around us and integrate this information to plan and complete tasks. Scientific goals include research into how perception, planning, and action interface, how we learn efficiently from small data sets and the creation of behavioral benchmark tasks.
  • photo of Bruno Olshausen

    Quest | CBMM Seminar Series - Bruno Olshausen

    Date: May 7, 2024 | 4pm EST
    Location: Singleton Auditorium, Building 46
    Olshausen's research focuses on understanding the information processing strategies employed by the visual system for tasks such as object recognition and scene analysis. Computer scientists have long sought to emulate the abilities of the visual system in digital computers, but achieving performance anywhere close to that exhibited by biological vision systems has proven elusive. Dr. Olshausen's approach is based on studying the response properties of neurons in the brain and attempting to construct mathematical models that can describe what neurons are doing in terms of a functional theory of vision. The aim of this work is not only to advance our understanding of the brain but also to devise new algorithms for image analysis and recognition based on how brains work.
  • child playing with building blocks

    Mission Update - The Development of Intelligent Minds

    Date: May 14, 2024 | 4pm EST
    Location: Quest Conference Room, 45-792
    This research mission broadly aims to understand how children grasp new concepts from few examples, how children build upon layers of concepts to reach an understanding of the world and have the flexibility to solve an unbounded range of problems. Can we build AI that starts like a baby and learns like a child?

Past Events

  • photo of Tom Griffiths

    Quest | CBMM Seminar Series - Tom Griffiths

    Date: March 12, 2024 | 4pm EST
    Location: Singleton Auditorium, Building 46
    Tom Griffiths develops mathematical models of higher-level cognition to understand the formal principles underlying our ability to solve everyday computational problems. His current focus on inductive problems — probabilistic reasoning, learning causal relationships, acquiring and using language, and inferring the structure of categories — is addressed by comparing human behavior to optimal computational solutions.
  • Arash Afraz

    Navigating perceptual space with neural perturbations

    Date: Tuesday, Feb. 27, 3:00 p.m. (note time change)
    Location: 46-5165 (MIBR Reading Room)
    Special Research Talk, Arash Afraz, Ph.D. Dr. Afraz received his MD from Tehran University of Medical Sciences in 2003 and his PhD in Psychology from Harvard University in 2009. He joined NIMH at NIH as a principal investigator in 2017 to lead the unit on Neurons, Circuits and Behavior.
  • Photo of Alexander Borst

    Quest | CBMM Seminar Series - Alexander Borst

    Date: February 14, 2024 | 2pm EST
    Location: Singleton Auditorium, Building 46
    Detecting the direction of image motion is important for visual navigation, predator avoidance and prey capture, and thus essential for the survival of all animals that have eyes. However, the direction of motion is not explicitly represented at the level of the photoreceptors: it rather needs to be computed by subsequent neural circuits.