On Wednesday 6 November Sander Bohté (CWI and UvA) will hold his inaugural lecture “the Brain as a computer” as a professor by special appointment of Cognitive Neurobiology, specialised in Computational Neuroscience, at the University of Amsterdam (UvA)'s Faculty of Science. The chair was designated on behalf of the Science Plus Foundation (Stichting Bèta Plus).
Is the brain a computer? To be able to understand the brain as a computer we have to focus on time and action as the basis of intelligent behavior. This is stated by Sander Bohté in his inaugural lecture.
These days, the brain is often explained in computer-terms. Your eyes sense and convey visual information to your brain, where the brains recognize who or what you are seeing, and, if important enough, this information is stored. We are then looking for the smart rules that that computer uses to compute what actions to carry out in various circumstances, based on what we see, feel and hear, combined with learning and remembered information from the past. The assumption is that such smart rules exist, and that we can write them down compact and clear enough for humans to understand. How far along are we with understanding these computational principles? And what can we learn from recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, and then specifically Deep Learning? And what remains to be discovered? These, and more, topics will be discussed in Sander Bohté’s inaugural lecture “The Brain as a Computer”.
About Sander Bohté
Bohté has been with CWI since 2004 and has been a senior member of staff since 2013. At the CWI, he leads the research into neural computation within the Machine Learning group. In addition, Bohté has been teaching the new Bachelor's course of Cognitive Computational Neuroscience at the UvA since 2014.
More information:
Inaugural Lecture Sander Bohté
Date: Wednesday 6 November, 16.00 hrs
Location: Aula – Oude Luthersekerk
Singel 411, Amsterdam
News item UvA (in Dutch)
