Capturing Intelligence at the Level of Thought

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Professor James L. McClelland (Stanford University and Google DeepMind)
• Thursday 14 September 2023, 18:30-21:00
• Botanic House, 98-100 Hills Rd, Cambridge CB2 1PH.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Aaron Turner.

CAIS Lecture followed by socialisation (with beer and pizza) | Tickets: student £15, standard £20 (inc Eventbrite fees)

Abstract: Today’s neural networks tantalize us with their apparent creativity and insight, yet we may also feel that they aren’t really thoughtful cognizing minds like those of ourselves and our peers. What’s the difference? I have come to feel that it may be useful to think that these systems don’t really have thoughts in the same sense that we do. Thus, I have set out on a quest to think about how we might better build model systems that can capture intelligence at the level of thought. In this talk I’ll describe what I mean by a thought, how it is that I see these systems as failing to operate at the level of thought, and some steps I and others are taking that I see as working toward the goal of understanding how to solve this interesting and challenging problem at the intersection of the sciences of mind, brain, and computation.

About the speaker: James L. (Jay) McClelland is a Cognitive Scientist who has used neural network models to explore the mechanisms of human and machine intelligence for nearly 50 years. In the late 1970’s he introduced a neural network model capturing the dynamics of activation flow through a neural network. He then teamed up with David Rumelhart, the inventor of the learning algorithm that powers todays neural-network based language models and many other machine learning systems. Together they produced the two-volume work Parallel Distributed Processing (MIT Press, 1986) that kindled the second wave of neural network research beginning in the mid 1980’s. McClelland led the creation the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh in the 1990’s, then moved to Stanford University, where he led the creation of the Center for Mind, Brain and Computation in 2008. He is the Lucie Stern Professor in the Psychology Department at Stanford, and holds courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Linguistics, and he is currently a Consultant Research Scientist at Google DeepMind.

Full details including how to purchase tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/professor-james-l-mcclelland-stanford-university-and-google-deepmind-registration-700475429867

This talk is part of the Cambridge AI Social series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Botanic House, 98-100 Hills Rd, Cambridge CB2 1PH
• Cambridge AI Social
• Mills & Reeve, Botanic House, 98-100 Hills Rd, Cambridge CB2 1PH

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.