A compilation of abstracts from the student projects of the 2014 Brains, Minds, and Machines Summer Course has been published online as CBMM Memo 024.

The inaugural Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM) Summer Course was held at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, from May 29 through June 12, 2014. The school was attended by 25 graduate students and postdocs from around the world, and provided a "deep end" introduction to the problem of intelligence — how the brain produces intelligent behavior and how we may be able to replicate intelligence in machines. Like CBMM itself, the philosophy of the course is that the synergistic combination of cognitive science, neuroscience, engineering, mathematics, and computer science, will lead to the creation of much more robust and sophisticated algorithms implemented in intelligent machines and will accelerate the scientific investigation of how intelligent behavior emerges from neural activity in the brain.

The first part of the two-week 2014 course combined instruction on the general theoretical foundations and computational methods used in intelligence research with an introduction to empirical methods used in neuroscience and cognitive science to probe the function of neural circuits and emergent behavior. The later part of the course examined current research within the five major research thrusts of the Center. Lectures by CBMM faculty were complemented with hands-on computer labs and group project work supervised by graduate and postdoctoral teaching assistants.