I am pleased to invite you to attend the MiNDS Colloquium TOMORROW Thursday November 22nd at 3:00 in HSC 4E20. Bring your coffee cup for coffee and cookies before the talk at 2:45.

Dr. Richard Zemel is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he has been a faculty member since 2000. He received the B.Sc. degree in History & Science from Harvard University in 1984, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.  He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute from 1993-1995, and from 1993-1994 at Carnegie Mellon University.  From 1996-2000, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Arizona, where he also held a joint appointment in the Center for Cognitive Science.

Dr Zemel's research is in artificial intelligence, with a focus on machine learning, visual perception, and neural coding. He has published over 100 technical papers and received several best paper awards at major AI conferences. He was program co-chair of the 2010 NIPS Conference.  His awards and honors include a Young Investigator Award from the US Office of Naval Research and three Dean's Excellence Awards at the University of Toronto.  He is an Adjunct Member of the Center for Vision Research at York University, and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

In his talk Dr Zemel will review various schemes that have been proposed for how populations of neurons can represent the uncertainty that underlies probabilistic reasoning.  He will also propose a particular Bayesian model for forming a spike train in a population of neurons to effectively maintain a proper probabilistic representation of the dynamic state.  A focus of the talk will be on how models based on standard, simple neural processes can approximate this optimal computation.

 

We look forward to seeing you all at the talk tomorrow.

 

Regards

 

Kathy

 

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Kathryn M Murphy PhD

Professor and Director MiNDS Graduate Program

Dept of Psychology Neuroscience & Behaviour

McMaster University

1280 Main St W 

Hamilton ON L8S 4K1