A theory of canonical thalamo-cortical microcircuits for predictive visual inference.
Dileep George
Warren Hall room 205A and via Zoom (see note below to request the zoom link)
What does a cortical column do? What do the different laminae of the cortex compute? What is the role of feedback connections in the cortex? What computations happen in the thalamus? — all these are important questions in our pursuit to understand human-like intelligence. In this talk I will present a detailed theory of canonical cortical circuits for vision that answers these questions using a coherent theoretical and computational model that demonstrated excellent performance on several vision benchmarks. We derive a theoretical cortical microcircuit by placing the requirements of the computational model within biological constraints. The derived model suggests precise algorithmic roles for the columnar and laminar feed-forward, feedback, and lateral connections, the thalamic pathway, blobs and interblobs, and the innate lineage-specific interlaminar connectivity within cortical columns. The model also explains several visual phenomena, including the subjective contour effect and neon-color spreading effect, with circuit-level precision. Our model and methodology provides a path forward in understanding cortical and thalamic computations.
Bio:
Dr. Dileep George is an entrepreneur, scientist and engineer working on AI, robotics, and neuroscience. He co-founded two companies in AI — Numenta, and Vicarious. At Numenta he co-developed the theory of Hierarchical Temporal Memory with Jeff Hawkins. Vicarious, his second company, was a pioneer in AI for robotics, and developed neuroscience-inspired models for vision, mapping, and concept learning. Vicarious got world-wide attention for fundamentally breaking text-based CAPTCHAs using a generative vision model. In 2021 Vicarious was acquired by Alphabet. As part of the acquisition, Dr. George and a team of researchers joined Google DeepMind where he is currently at. Dr. George has an MS and Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay.
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