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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.
  • Photo of Yael Niv

    Quest | CBMM Seminar Series - Yael Niv

    Date: February 6, 2024 | 4pm EST
    Location: Singleton Auditorium, Building 46
    The Niv lab focuses on the neural and computational processes underlying reinforcement learning and decision-making, studying the ongoing day-to-day processes by which animals and humans learn from trial and error. Of particular interest is how attention and memory processes interact with reinforcement learning.
  • Photo of Daniel Wolpert

    Quest | CBMM Seminar Series - Daniel Wolpert

    Date: December 5 2023 | 4pm EST
    Location: Singleton Auditorium, Building 46
    Humans spend a lifetime learning, storing and refining a repertoire of motor memories appropriate for the multitude of tasks we perform. However, it is unknown what principle underlies the way our continuous stream of sensorimotor experience is segmented into separate memories and how we adapt and use this growing repertoire. I will review our recent work on how humans learn to make skilled movements focussing on how statistical learning can lead to multimodal object representations, how we represent the dynamics of objects, the role of context in the expression, updating and creation of motor memories and how families of objects are learned. 
  • photo of Dylan Hadfield-Menell in front of tree

    Quest | CBMM Seminar Series - Dylan Hadfield-Menell

    Date: December 4, 2023 | 4pm EST
    Location: Singleton Auditorium, Building 46
    For AI systems to be safe and effective, they need to be aligned with the goals and values of users, designers, and society. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges of AI alignment and go over research directions to develop safe AI systems. I'll begin with theoretical results that motivate the alignment problem broadly. In particular, I will show how optimizing incomplete goal specifications reliably causes systems to select unhelpful or harmful actions. Next, I will discuss mitigation measures that counteract this failure mode. I will focus on approaches for incorporating human feedback into objectives, interpreting and understanding learned policies, and maintaining uncertainty about intended goals.
  • Photo of Peter Dayan

    Quest | CBMM Seminar Series - Peter Dayan

    Date: November 14, 2023| 4pm EST
    Location: Singleton Auditorium, Building 46
    Much existing work in reinforcement learning involves environments that  are either intentionally neutral, lacking a role for cooperation and  competition, or intentionally simple, when agents need imagine nothing  more than that they are playing versions of themselves or are happily  cooperative. Richer game theoretic notions become important as these  constraints are relaxed. For humans, this encompasses issues that  concern utility, such as envy and guilt, and that concern inference,  such as recursive modeling of other players, I will discuss some our  work in this direction using the framework of interactive partially  observable Markov decision-processes, illustrating deception,  scepticism, threats and irritation. This is joint work with Nitay Alon,  Andreas Hula, Read Montague, Jeff Rosenschein and Lion Schulz.
  • photo of Mike Hasselmo

    Quest | CBMM Seminar Series - Mike Hasselmo

    Date: September 12, 2023 | 4pm EST
    Location: Singleton Auditorium, Building 46
    Recordings of neurons in cortical structures in behaving rodents show responses to dimensions of space and time relevant to encoding and retrieval of spatiotemporal trajectories of behavior in episodic memory. This includes the coding of spatial location by grid cells in entorhinal cortex and place cells in hippocampus, some of which also fire as time cells when a rodent runs on a treadmill (Kraus et al., 2013; 2015; Mau et al., 2018). Trajectory encoding also includes coding of the direction and speed of movement. Speed is coded by both firing rate and frequency of neuronal rhythmicity (Hinman et al., 2016, Dannenberg et al., 2020), and inactivation of input from the medial septum impairs the spatial selectivity of grid cells suggesting rhythmic coding of running speed is important for spatial coding by grid cells (Brandon et al., 2011; Robinson et al., 2023).