Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam (26 – 28 August 2019)
Compared to modern Deep Learning, the human brain needs vastly fewer examples to learn tasks and is massively more energy efficient. The brain’s ability to control, and learn to control, hundreds of flexible and variable muscles for motion remains unsurpassed. Sensory information processing, cognitive deliberation and subsequent muscle control is also an ongoing continuous-time process, a fact mostly ignored in deep learning models. Finally, the brain solves an inherently multi-scale problem: fast high-dimensional sensory information feeds, (relatively) slow and low dimensional cognitive deliberations, which are then translated into fast and high-dimensional muscle activations resulting in typically low-dimensional feedback for learning from the environment in the form of success or failure of actions. Recently, models for a number of components in this sensori-cognitive-motor chain have been proposed.
In this workshop, we aim to bring together experts in computational neuroscience and machine learning to foster collaboration and start working on integrating the various components into coherent end-to-end cognitive models. Specifically, we aim to determine the `missing components’ that are needed to implement fast and effective sensori-cognitive-motor models.
At a high level, the main topics in the workshop include End-to-end time-continuous learning, Multi-level Motion Representation, Planning and Control and Event-based asynchronous neural computation.
The workshop will be held over a 3-day period at CWI, the Dutch National Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science. Invited speakers will bring broad-ranging expertise from neuroscience and machine learning, with a special focus on efficient platforms. The workshop will also have plenty of time for formal and informal discussions.
Confirmed invited speakers
Thomas Nowotny (Univ Sussex, UK)
Wulfram Gerstner (EPFL, CH)
Shih-Chii Liu (INI Zurich, CH)
Eleni Vasilaki (Univ Sheffield, UK)
Friedemann Zenke (FMI Basel, CH)
Terry Stewart (Univ Waterloo, CA)
De Ma (Zhejiang University,CN)
Chiara Bartolozzi (IIT Genova, IT)
Raoul-Martin Memmesheimer (Univ Bonn, DE)
Mihai Petrovici (Univ Heidelberg, DE)
Jamie Knight (Univ Sussex, UK)
Program
The current program can be found here. Directions are here.
Organising Committee
- Sander Bohte – CWI / Univ. of Amsterdam / RUG Groningen, NL
- Aditya Gilra – IST Austria, AT
- Qinghai Guo – Huawei Research, CN
- J. Camilo Vasquez Tieck – FZI Karlsruhe, GE
