#041 - Biologically Plausible Neural Networks - Dr. Simon Stringer

Dr. Simon Stringer. Obtained his Ph.D in mathematical state space control theory and has been a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University for over 27 years. Simon is the director of the the Oxford Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence, which is based within the Oxford University Department of Experimental Psychology. His department covers vision, spatial processing, motor function, language and consciousness -- in particular -- how the primate visual system learns to make sense of complex natural scenes. Dr. Stringers laboratory houses a team of theoreticians, who are developing computer models of a range of different aspects of brain function. Simon's lab is investigating the neural and synaptic dynamics that underpin brain function. An important matter here is the The feature-binding problem which concerns how the visual system represents the hierarchical relationships between features. the visual system must represent hierarchical binding relations across the entire visual field at every spatial scale and level in the hierarchy of visual primitives.

We discuss the emergence of self-organised behaviour, complex information processing, invariant sensory representations and hierarchical feature binding which emerges when you build biologically plausible neural networks with temporal spiking dynamics. 

00:00:09 Tim Intro 

00:09:31 Show kickoff 

00:14:37 Hierarchical Feature binding and timing of action potentials 

00:30:16 Hebb to Spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) 

00:35:27 Encoding of shape primitives 

00:38:50 Is imagination working in the same place in the brain 

00:41:12 Compare to supervised CNNs 

00:45:59 Speech recognition, motor system, learning mazes 

00:49:28 How practical are these spiking NNs 

00:50:19 Why simulate the human brain 

00:52:46 How much computational power do you gain from differential timings 

00:55:08 Adversarial inputs 

00:59:41 Generative / causal component needed? 

01:01:46 Modalities of processing i.e. language 

01:03:42 Understanding 

01:04:37 Human hardware 

01:06:19 Roadmap of NNs? 

01:10:36 Intepretability methods for these new models 

01:13:03 Won't GPT just scale and do this anyway? 

01:15:51 What about trace learning and transformation learning 

01:18:50 Categories of invariance 

01:19:47 Biological plausibility 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aisgNLypUKs