Speaker: Prof. Rajesh P N Rao, University of Washington, Seattle, USA
Title: The Predictive Brain: An Active Predictive Coding Framework for Natural and Artificial Intelligence
Date: 9 December 2024
Summary of the talk: More than half the volume of the human brain is occupied by the neocortex which has delineated roles of visual perception in the visual cortex, action in the motor cortex, cognition in the prefrontal cortex, etc. However, recent experiments indicate that almost all cortical areas, even those traditionally labelled as sensory, are modulated by upcoming actions. Parallel data from anatomical studies point to major outputs from almost all cortical areas to sub-cortical centers that control the body. In this talk, Prof Rao will present the active predictive coding framework, which puts actions center stage in natural and artificial intelligence. He will review the Bayesian brain hypothesis, and then discuss predictive coding, a specific implementation of the Bayesian brain hypothesis that acknowledges cortical anatomy and physiology. This sets the stage for his more recent active predictive coding model, which suggests new explanations for how we recognize an object and its parts using eye movements, why perception seems stable despite eye movements, how we learn compositional representations of the world, how we plan complex actions by composing sequences of sub-goals and simpler actions, and how we form episodic memories of our sensory-motor experiences and learn abstract concepts such as a family tree. The talk will also briefly cover his work on brain co-processors that use artificial intelligence to interact directly with the brain to restore or augment human function.
About the speaker: Prof. Rajesh P N Rao is the CJ and Elizabeth Hwang Professor in the Paul G Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle. He is also the co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology, adjunct professor in the Bioengineering department, and faculty member in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at UW. His research interests span computational neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence.