Summer Course Home
Course Organizers:
Gabriel Kreiman, Harvard
Boris Katz, MIT
Tomaso Poggio, MIT
In the summer of 2020, the Brains, Minds, and Machines Summer Course was held remotely due to the pandemic, and engaged hundreds of participants from around the world, some of whom are shown here.
Overview
Since the summer of 2014, the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM) has hosted an annual summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. This course provides an intensive 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 neuroscience, cognitive science, mathematics, and computer science, will lead to the creation of 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 content of the 2015 summer course is published on MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) and includes an extensive collection of video lectures on a wide range of topics, such as vision, language, audition and speech, robotics, human cognition, the development of intelligence, and the theory of intelligent systems. The Brains, Minds, and Machines Summer Course continues to be very relevant and popular with OCW learners and educators. Since its publication, there have been many exciting advances in the science and engineering of intelligence. This new resource provides a taste of some of these advances through a selection of video lectures from 2016 to the 2020 virtual summer course, complemented with a large collection of tutorials on computational and empirical methods used in intelligence research. Three panel discussions further address fundamental questions about the relationship between biological brains and AI algorithms, what is special about human intelligence, and what are the remaining “Hilbert questions” in AI. The most recent BMM Summer Course 2021 recordings have been released.
In the video below, Gabriel Kreiman briefly introduces the Brains, Minds, and Machines Summer Course and Tomaso Poggio describes the scientific vision of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines and provides a historical perspective on his journey through neuroscience and artificial intelligence that led to the creation of the Center.
Video
Acknowledgments
Ellen Hildreth adapted materials from the 2016-2020 Brains, Minds, and Machines Summer Course for this resource. Kris Brewer is responsible for the filming and editing of lecture videos and creation of the online presentation of this material.