Quantitative Biology 2018: Neurscience and Artificial Intelligence：Where Do We Meet ?（2018. 7.2-7.6）

  The Center for Quantitative Biology (CQB) at Peking University has been organizing annual meetings in diverse topics of quantitative biology since 2000. These meetings have successfully gathered scientists of diverse backgrounds from all over the world who are interested in quantitative biology research. The chosen topics for the CQB 2018 annual meeting are neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

  In the last decades, neuroscience has entered into a revolutionary new phase thanks to the fast development of various quantitative measurement tools such as whole brain Ca imaging, optogenetics, and large scale connectomics. These quantitative measurements of the brain activity and brain architecture have profoundly enriched our understanding of how external sensory signals are represented by the brain, how the brain process the information to learn, and how memory is stored. In the last 10 years, machine learning (artificial intelligence) has also attracted a great deal of attention due to the success of the deep learning algorithms based on artificial-neural-network (ANN), which was inspired by neural network in the brain over 30 years ago. Despite their great successes (such as beating the world’s Go-champions), the current deep neural network algorithms do not contain many of the key ingredients of how the brain learns or computes in both the dynamics of learning and the underlying neural network architecture. Based on these considerations, we plan to organize an interdisciplinary workshop to discuss the new developments in neuroscience and their possible implications in developing brain-inspired machine learning algorithms and AI.

  The main theme of the meeting is based on two related questions: 1) How does the brain perceive, represent, and process information? 2) How can insights from neuroscience be used for machine learning and artificial intelligent (AI) in general? With more than 20 experts and deep thinkers on both neuroscience and machine learning, we believe the meeting will help start a constructive dialog between the two disciplines.

  Prior to the meeting (July 2-3) we will hold a two-day tutorial in neuroscience and artificial neural network. If you are interested in the tutorial sessions, you are also welcome to attend.

  Programme download:

  qb2018: Neurscience and Artificial Intelligence：Where Do We Meet ?-Programme