Past Events

Leyla Isik is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research aims to answer the question of how humans extract complex information using a combination of human neuroimaging, intracranial recordings, machine learning, and behavioral techniques. Before joining Johns Hopkins, Isik was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and Harvard in the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines working with Nancy Kanwisher and Gabriel Kreiman. Isik completed her PhD at MIT where she was advised by Tomaso Poggio.

Recordings are now posted from the talks in which researchers from MIT's Quest for Intelligence and its science driver — the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines — shared the latest progress on understanding natural intelligence and how we aim to use that scientific progress to drive the future of AI and other impact areas. We were happy to welcome supporters, industry collaborators, and members of the MIT community to a day-long series of presentations and conversations about our vision, our most recent progress, and the future of research on the Science and Engineering of Intelligence.

George Konidaris is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and director of the Intelligent Robot Lab at Brown, which forms part of bigAI (Brown Integrative, General AI). He is also the Chief Roboticist of Realtime Robotics, a startup based on his research on robot motion planning. Konidaris focuses on understanding how to design agents that learn abstraction hierarchies that enable fast, goal-oriented planning. He develops and applies techniques from machine learning, reinforcement learning, optimal control and planning to construct well-grounded hierarchies that result in fast planning for common cases, and are robust to uncertainty at every level of control.

Sizhe Yuen is a final year PhD Student at the University of Southampton. His work focuses on the development of Evolutionary Algorithms using modern biological concepts from the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. This talk will focus on the concept of epigenetic inheritance. Using a contemporary biological framework based on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, epigenetic inheritance is shown as a missing gap despite being a key building block in modern interpretations of how evolution occurs.

The Quest for Intelligence community is invited to join the first MIT Symposium on Operationalizing Your Enterprise’s AI Strategy, brought to you by the Machine Intelligence for Manufacturing and Operations (MIMO) Committee!. This will be an in-person event on May 4th where business leaders, technical experts, and students can come together to discuss the state of AI in manufacturing and operations, and share ideas for the future.

All are invited to the CBMM | Quest: Brains, Minds, and Machines Seminar Series, featuring Demis Hassabis, the Founder and CEO of DeepMind, the world’s leading AI research company that aims to solve intelligence to advance science and benefit humanity. Founded in London in 2010, DeepMind has achieved breakthrough results in many challenging AI domains from Atari games to StarCraft II, and has published over 1000 research papers - including more than two dozen in Nature and Science.

This talk will focus on the cellular and biophysical mechanisms by which the direction of image motion is computed in Drosophila neurons.

Join the MIT Quest for Intelligence and the Artificial Intelligence @ MIT Student Group for a Panel Discussion! This event will focus on MIT Quest for Intelligence Research Missions. Speakers include: Jim DiCarlo, Director, Quest for Intelligence, Nick Roy, Director, MIT Quest Systems Engineering, Nancy Kanwisher, Walter A. Rosenblith Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Robert Yang, Associate Investigator, McGovern Institute Assistant Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.