The dream of understanding the mind and the brain and replicating human intelligence in machines was at the core of several new fields created at MIT during the ‘50s and ‘60s, including information theory, cybernetics, and Artificial Intelligence. The same dream was at the core of the NSF-funded, multi-institutional Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM) and of its integration in the new Quest for Intelligence, which is bridging faculty across all the Schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Our symposium will focus on the topic of intelligence – one of the greatest problems in science and engineering and a key to our future as a society. The symposium will look at the past, in particular at the advances achieved by CBMM over the past 10 years. But, it will mainly focus on the future, in particular the future of neuroscience (Brains), the future of cognitive science (Minds), the future of AI (Machines) and their synergies.

The goal of the workshop is to celebrate CBMM’s success, and to explore the future of CBMM and Quest, in pursuing the natural science of intelligence and investigating its synergies with AI. Deep learning was inspired by neuroscience and led to a better computational understanding of primate perception. It also led to surprising engineering advances such as AlphaGo, Alphafold, and LLMs. This symposium aims to take stock of what has been scientifically accomplished via that framework, to illuminate what still must be accomplished, and to chart next steps by discussing and debating which of the current approaches are likely to achieve those scientific accomplishments.

Pre-registration is required.

For more information, including registration, schedule, and speakers, please visit our event page here - https://cbmm.mit.edu/CBMM10