Weekly Research Meetings

CBMM Weekly Research Meeting

Oct 18, 2013 - 8:30 pm
Venue:  Harvard University: Northwest Bldg, Room 353

Agenda

Gabriel Kreiman will introduce Thrust 2.
Hanlin Tang, student in the Kreiman Lab, will give a brief presentation based on object completion and recordings in humans.
Matt Wilson will give a brief presentation based on recordings in rodents.
General discussion.

CBMM Weekly Research Meeting

Oct 4, 2013 - 8:30 pm
Venue:  Harvard University: William James Hall, 7th Floor Address:  33 Kirkland Street Harvard University William James Hall Cambridge, MA 02138 United States Speaker/s:  Nakayama Lab Kanwisher Lab

Harvard will be hosting this week’s CBMM Research meeting.

There will be informal presentations from the Nakayama and Kanwisher labs.

We hope you will be able to join us.

CBMM Weekly Research Meeting

Sep 27, 2013 - 8:30 pm
Venue:  MIT: McGovern Institute Reading Room, 46-5165 Speaker/s:  Tomaso Poggio

Agenda

  • CBMM vision
  • Meeting with Farnam Jahanian
  • Education+outreach decisions
  • Core project: discussion
  • Community building

Summary, Director Poggio:

Last week we had the first of a series of weekly meetings which have the purposes

  •  of community building
  • of sharing the CBMM vision and
  • of discussing the specifics of our research plan

Last week I introduced the vision and the goals of CBMM and described its core challenge. The discussion that followed was about the CBMM Challenge, about various educational and outreach issues presented by Dr. Sassanfar and about a report on the meeting that several of us had with the director of CISE (at NSF). I enclose a copy of slides and agenda. Please have a look, especially if you were not able to make it, because I added a few more bits of information!

Biological and artificial curiosity: models, behaviors and robots

Nov 18, 2014 - 9:00 pm
Venue:  MIT: McGovern Institute Seminar Room, 46-3189 Address:  43 Vassar Street MIT Bldg 46 Cambridge, MA 02139 United States Speaker/s:  Goren Gordon Personal Robots Group Media Lab, MIT

Curiosity is one of the major human drives. Can we model curiosity in biological agents? Can we implement these models in artificial systems? What happens when a curious child meets a curious robot? In this talk I present recent work on the study of curiosity. First, studies of curiosity-driven behaviors in humans and rodents are presented, where I show that biological agents attempt to manage their novelty in a structured manner. A model that captures this structure is presented, wherein emergent exploration behaviors are balanced with novelty-based withdrawal-like actions. The model, which has only a few free parameters, reproduce, explain and predict many observed behaviors in mice and rats. A similar model explained human subjects’ behavior, when artificial whiskers were attached to their fingers and they were asked to localize poles, just like rodents. The same curiosity-based architecture is also implemented in curious robots that learn about their own body and people interacting with them, resulting in emergent behaviors that have similar characteristics to infants’ behaviors. Finally, results from a recent study show that children’s curiosity is higher after interacting with a curious social robot, compared to a non-curious one. Future work on studies of infants’, children’s and adults’ curiosity-driven behavior as well as the development of autonomous curious robots, concludes the talk.

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