NeuroAI Workshop - NORA Annual Conference 2024

Keith Downing - Prediction: the core of neural-based intelligence

Abstract

Prediction is a cognitive advantage like few others, inherently linked to our ability to survive and thrive. Our brains are awash in signals that embody prediction, across a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. In this lecture, I will investigate the origins and anatomy of natural and artificial neural networks to explore how, when designed as predictive modules, their components might serve as the basis for the simulated evolution of advanced neural network systems. In addition, links to nascent Chat systems will be hard to avoid, since their underlying intelligence appears to emerge from performing simple predictive tasks, albeit with complex attention-based representations and massive transformer architectures.

Markus Pettersen, Vemund Schøyen, Mattis Østby, Anders Malthe-Sørenssen,  Mikkel Lepperød
Grid Cells Without Place Cells or Path Integration

Felix Reimers, Ola Huse Ramstad, Axel Sandvig, Ioanna Sandvig, Solve Sæbø, Stefano Nichele
Performance of C.Elegans Connectomes as Computational Reservoirs

Mia-Katrin Kvalsund, Kai Olav Ellefsen, Kyrre Glette, Sidney Pontes-Filho, Mikkel Elle Lepperød
Artificial cortical columns with moving sensors display active sensing

Jarl Giske
The salmon digital twin: modeling decision-making and wellbeing in vertebrates

Kosio Beshkov, Gaute T. Einevoll
Towards a Topological Classification of Representations in Neural Networks

Andreas Massey, Solve Sæbø
Spiking Neural Networks for clustering and self-supervised learning

Joshua Ifeanyi Okonkwo, Ali Muhtaroglu
Spiking Neural Network Hardware Architecture for Stand-Alone Real-Time Edge Reinforcement Learning

Nicolai Haug, Markus B. Pettersen, Mikkel E. Lepperød
Spiking Denoising Network: A Novel Approach for Generative Modeling Inspired by Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Alessandro Treves - Platypus to Plato: key steps in the emergence of creative cognition

Abstract

Among the myriad, largely obscure developments that, over the last half billion years, have endowed us with our brain, I argue that two stand out in both significance and abruptness. The first is a structural phase transition, which likely occurred over 300 million years ago, leading to a reorganization of a simil-reptilian medial and dorsal pallium to yield the mammalian hippocampus and 6-layer neocortex. The second is a functional phase transition, allowing neocortices which had gradually evolved sufficient connectivity to suddenly engage in latching dynamics, the neural substrate of free-wheeling behaviour. Understanding both may be critical to the dialogue between natural and artificial intelligence.

Keynote 1: Keith Downing

Keith Downing is a professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (Alife) at NTNU, with a strong interest in the connections between life and intelligence in both natural and artiificial systems.  His 40 years of research in these fields has culminated in two books with MIT Press:  Intelligence Emerging (2015), and Gradient Expectations (2023).  Most of Keith's work involves evolutionary computation and artificial neural networks, and he teaches courses in AI Programming and Deep Learning at NTNU.  He enjoys lecturing on AI and ALife to diverse audiences throughout Norway.

Keynote 2: Alessandro Treves

Alessandro Treves has studied at Yale and then physics in Florence, Rome and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he got his PhD with Daniel Amit in 1989, but also met Giordana and theoretical neuroscience. After a postdoc with Edmund Rolls in Oxford, he has been at SISSA since 1992, where he enjoys the collaboration of the non-hierarchical, self-organizing limbo research group. Between 2003-2022 he has been affiliated with the research center of Edvard and May-Britt Moser at NTNU, and from 2024 with that of Hanne and Tor Stensola at UiA.

In 2011-2013 he has served as Science Advisor to the Italian Embassy in Tel Aviv and upon returning to SISSA as Director of the Master in Complex Actions, an executive course aimed at stimulating hi-tech entrepreneurship.

In 2010 he has convened the first, and so far last, Ararat Memory Meeting in Yerevan, Armenia. He has lectured and taught courses at IPM in Tehran, Al Quds University in East Jerusalem and Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, establishing there cross-disciplinary student exchange initiatives.