Colloquium Series 2018-2019

Joel Zylberberg
York University

(Learning) Visual Representations

Visual stimuli elicit action potentials in the retina, that propagate to the brain, where further action potentials are elicited. What is the language of this signalling? In other words, how do patterns of action potentials in each neural circuit correspond to stimuli in the outside world? The first part of this talk will highlight recent work from my laboratory that confronts this problem in the retina and visual cortex. Next, I will discuss on-going work that asks how those representations are learned. Specifically, I will highlight a joint theory-experiment research program that investigates whether and how the brain's visual neural circuits implement the same kinds of learning algorithms as are found in modern artificial intelligence systems.