Beyond ConvNets: Deepening our Computational Understanding of Neural Systems
Tuesday, November 29, 2022
11:30 am - 12:45 pm
William L. Harkness Hall, Room 117
100 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511
United States
Daniel Yamins, PhD
Department of Psychology and Computer Science Stanford University
The Wu Tsai Institute presents our Distinguished Speaker Series featuring computational neuroscientist Daniel Yamins, PhD. Please join us on Tuesday, November 29, at 11:30 a.m.
Yamins will begin by discussing advances in unsupervised learning and how they spur improvements over older categorization-based convnets as models of primate visual system. Then, he will show how these models can be extended to describe the emergence of a functional organization throughout the ventral visual pathway and better allow us to understand the existence (or lack thereof) of multiple visual streams. Yamins will also describe recent state-of-the-art approaches to visual scene understanding, which leverage ideas from cognitive science and developmental psychology in building better artificial intelligence—closing with some thoughts about the philosophy of computational neuroscience in the age of AI.
Dr. Yamins is a cognitive computational neuroscientist at Stanford University, an assistant professor of Psychology and Computer Science, a faculty scholar at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, and an affiliate of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research group focuses on reverse engineering the algorithms of the human brain to learn how our minds work and build more effective artificial intelligence systems. He is especially interested in how brain circuits for sensory information processing and decision-making arise by optimizing high-performing cortical algorithms for key behavioral tasks. He received his AB and PhD degrees from Harvard University, was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, and has been a visiting researcher at Princeton University and Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a recipient of an NSF Career Award, the James S. McDonnell Foundation award in Understanding Human Cognition, and the Sloan Research Fellowship. Additionally, he is a Simons Foundation Investigator.
