MIT Quest with AI @ MIT Research Blitz

Tuesday, October 12, 2021 | 12pm – 1pm ET
Speakers: Bilge Yildiz and Jacob Andreas

The MIT Quest for Intelligence virtual event, “Mini Research Blitz” in partnership with Artificial Intelligence @ MIT undergraduate group. This talk will be held virtually and discuss the Quest Research Mission topic “Brain Guided Intelligence Hardware” with speakers Bilge Yildiz and Jacob Andreas. Please see below for a schedule of events.

12:00-12:25 – Electrochemical synapses as building blocks to emulate and advance learning models
Bilge Yildiz, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering

Our goal is to advance our understanding of learning rules in the brain, and to utilize and translate that understanding to the design of brain-guided machine intelligence platforms. This research is at the intersection of electrochemistry, neuroscience, device and circuit design, and materials science. In this research, we are advancing electrochemically tunable synapses as a building block in a novel hardware architecture that emulates biological learning of a complex vocal behavior in the songbird. Electrochemical ionic-electronic devices have an immense potential to serve as artificial synapses, and enable a new domain of programmable hardware for machine intelligence. These novel devices work with a charge-controlled cation-intercalation mechanism, and present very high energy efficiency.

12:25-12:50 – Decoding how minds and machines make meaning from language
Jacob Andreas, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

A defining feature of human cognition, language conveys meaning and offers a glimpse into how the mind represents both external and internal states. In this Quest Mission project, the team will investigate how meaning is represented and how people and AI systems learn to extract meaning from symbols, pixels, and other data. They will develop a new set of benchmark tasks for comparing and analyzing the way humans and AI models represent and reason about meaning in scenes, events, and social interactions.

12:50-1:00 – Q&A

To view a recording of this event please follow the link here.