I was an invited speaker at the Neurips conference in New Orleans in Dec 2023 for the NeuroAI social.

I was more than surprised to be invited to what is now primarily an AI/ML conference (despite "Neural" being the first word, and the conference's origins in comp neuroscience). To say that the successful AI systems currently deployed and neuroscience/study of biological intelligence have diverged would be an understatement, it was a somewhat odd choice for the organizers to invite a neurophysiologist like me.

So, I took the invite as an opportunity to talk about attention in biological vision and how whatever they now call as attention in AI/ML/CNN/transformers
is almost orthogonal to what many others and I study within visual neuroscience or psychology or cognitive science.

While the talk was a partial critique of current AI models, it was more a call for them to take seriously the one instance of intelligence (i.e., the biological world) seriously and how it still has much to offer towards designing better AI systems.

If attention is not one of the cognitive ingredients that makes up the intelligence recipe towards autonomous systems, I don't know what is.

The talk slides can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/927f50bfvqpwtserizgl5/NeuroAI_Neurips_KS2023.pdf?rlkey=r3pgvsyoudwczapjijx80pj7l

#Neurips2023 #NeuroAI #Attention #Vision #BiologicalVision #ActiveVision #SpaceVariance #NonlinearCompression #EyeMovements #Neurodynamics #AutonomousSystems #AI #ML

This seems like good opportunity to finally get started on Mastodon:
I‘m excited to announce that I have recently joined the faculty of the Department of Psychology at the University of Groningen. Looking forward to continue working on #ActiveVision and #EEG/Eyetracking in a beautiful city with an excellent team of new colleagues.
@universityofgroningen

@marcwhoward oh I should clarify: my low prediction error is because I fully expect rich movement correlates brain wide, as we’ve seen with #corollarydischarge #activesensing especially #saccade related effects in #activevision. Movement initiation offers a path into the brains internal timing. Working back we can see ways in which neurons care more about their fellow neurons than they do about “the world out there”, and that sensing absent movement is more the exception than the rule. Animals are…animate. Plants….plant. Look at me all “brain inside out”. I try not to be too constructivist, but I Kant. No shade whatsoever to actually conducting the challenging experiments that measure and materialize this idea, and tell us more about how and where movement effects are seen!