3:30–4:30 pm
Jones 303
5747 S. Ellis Avenue Pre-Seminar Refreshments will be served at 3:00 PM in Jones 303
We are pleased to have Prof. John Lafferty, the John C. Malone Professor of Statistics & Data Science at Yale University, as our honored speaker, for the twenty-fourth annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures.
Title: Abstraction in Artificial and Natural Intelligence: Part II: Models, Mechanisms, and Experiments
Abstract: Reasoning in terms of relations, analogies, and abstraction is a hallmark of human intelligence. How can abstract symbols emerge from distributed, neural representations? One general approach uses an inductive bias for learning called the "relational bottleneck" that is motivated from principles of cognitive neuroscience. We present a framework that builds this inductive bias into machine learning models that transform distributed symbols to implement a form of abstraction. Computational experiments are presented on a broad range of problems. Biologically plausible mechanisms for these models are proposed to shed light on how abstraction may be implemented in the human brain.