[CTN] CTN seminar: Dr. Richard Zemel (U of Toronto), Mar 18, 3.30pm in PAS 2464

[Matthijs van der Meer]

Dear all,

Please join us for next Tuesday's CTN seminar (Mar 18) by Dr. Richard
(Rich) Zemel, from the University of Toronto. Title and abstract follow
below.

Time and place are the usual, 3.30pm on Tuesday in PAS 2464.

If you would like to meet with Dr. Zemel, and/or come to lunch, let me
know. There will not be a dinner.

Hope to see you there,

- Matt



Richard Zemel
Professor
Deptartment of Computer Science
University of Toronto

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~zemel/

Title: Neural Representations in a Dynamic Uncertain World

As animals interact with their environments, they must constantly update
estimates about relevant states of the world. For example, a batter must
rapidly re-estimate the velocity of a baseball as he decides whether and
when to swing at a pitch. Probabilistic models provide a description of
optimal updating based on prior probabilities, a dynamical model, and
sensory evidence, and have proved to be consistent with the results of
many diverse psychophysical studies. In this talk I will consider three
basic questions. First, how can populations of neurons represent the
uncertainty that underlies this probabilistic formulation? Second, how
can neural spikes be used to represent adaptive computation? And
finally, how can the population responses be learned from interaction
with the environment? I will describe some recent progress in machine
learning that suggests that predictions of behavior can be improved by
incorporating particular constraints in a learning model.