SiE02 - The Brain Debate: Building and understanding brains: How can AI research inform neuroscience? (15:15-16:45)

Panelists will discuss how new work in AI research can guide our understanding of biological brains, across levels of description, from cells to systems to behaviour. For example, do humans learn like machine learning models, by gradient descent? Is there a biological analogue for backpropagation? Are biological systems best described as learning from supervision, by reinforcement, or in an unsupervised fashion? How can we build artificial systems that are robust and sample-efficient, like biological systems? What is the outlook for neuroscience in the new age of AI research? There will be short (2-3 slide) presentations on this theme, questions from the audience, and discussions among the panel.

Chair:

Christopher Summerfield, Oxford University (UK)

Speakers:

Claudia Clopath, Imperial College London (UK)

Stanislas Dehaene, College de France (France)

Kanaka Rajan, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (USA)

Josh Tenenbaum, MIT (USA)

Jane Wang, Staff Research Scientist, Neuroscience, DeepMind (UK)