QLS Seminar - Today, 16 July at 11h00 - "Learning beyond lookup tables"

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

Dear All,

Today, 16 July at 11h00, Prof. Venkatesh Murthy (Harvard U.) will give a 
seminar titled:

*"Learning beyond lookup tables"*

Decades of research in the laboratory setting has led to big advances in 
our understanding of how animals learn, and the neural circuits 
involved. Surprisingly, most of such research involves behavioral tasks 
that essentially test memorization, using the same stimuli, task rules 
or motor outputs in the testing phase as those used in the training. 
This contrasts machine learning systems, where generalization is 
considered a fundamental test of learning, and emphasizes performance 
evaluation with new in-distribution or out-of-distribution examples. We 
are developing behavioral tasks in mice to understand the brain basis of 
generalization. I will present a concrete example on olfactory learning 
in mice that involves detection of relevant odorants embedded within 
complex mixtures of distractors.
These experiments suggest that mice have an inductive bias towards 
generalization.

Indico: https://indico.ictp.it/event/11404/

The seminar will take place in the *Common Area, 2nd floor, old SISSA 
building* (Via Beirut, 2).

You are all most welcome to attend!

Best regards,

Erica

Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-22404623 (NEW PHONE NUMBER)
www.ictp.it/research/qls.aspx
e-mail:qls at ictp.it