Events

NYU Tandon ECE Seminar Series on Modern AI

Speaker: Samantha Wood

Location: 370 Jay Street, Room Room 825
Videoconference link: https://nyu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMscumqqDgoG9LAnzOnf8Y_RHATnGs2X7Pu#/registration

Date: Tuesday, April 30, 2024

For centuries, philosophers and psychologists have debated the origins of the mind. What are the necessary “ingredients” for perceiving and understanding the world around us? A key puzzle is object perception: understanding the essential components that enable a mind to recognize and make sense of objects in its surroundings. Using parallel controlled-rearing experiments on newborn animals and artificial intelligence (AI) models, we will start to build, from scratch, the recipe for functional object perception, including the training data, visual system, motor system, and learning rules needed. By using controlled-rearing experiments with newborn animals, we can precisely record and manipulate all of the visual stimuli that are available from birth to test how visual experience impacts object perception. By “rearing” AI models in the same environments as animals and testing them on the same tasks, we can use AI models as task-performing models of developing animal minds. I will argue that this reverse-engineering approach provides an integrative framework for linking the study of artificial and biological intelligence