BI 229 Tomaso Poggio: Principles of Intelligence and Learning

BI 229 Tomaso Poggio: Principles of Intelligence and Learning

Date Posted:  January 26, 2026
Date Recorded:  January 14, 2026
CBMM Speaker(s):  Tomaso Poggio
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Description: 

Tomaso Poggio on his eternal quest to discover the theoretical principles explaining intelligence and learning in brains, minds, and machines.

Tomaso Poggio is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and director of both the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. Tomaso believes we are in-between building and understanding useful AI That is, we are in between engineering and theory. He likens this stage to the period after Volta invented the battery and Maxwell developed the equations of electromagnetism. Tomaso has worked for decades on the theory and principles behind intelligence and learning in brains and machines. I first learned of him via his work with David Marr, in which they developed "Marr's levels" of analysis that frame explanation in terms of computation/function, algorithms, and implementation. Since then Tomaso has added "learning" as a crucial fourth level. I will refer to you his autobiography to learn more about the many influential people and projects he has worked with and on, the theorems he and others have proved to discover principles of intelligence, and his broader thoughts and reflections. Currently, he is focused on the principles of compositional sparsity and genericity to explain how it is that deep learning networks can (computationally) efficiently learn useful representations to solve tasks.