My research interests are centered around discovering fundamental computational principles that underlie the extraordinary capabilities to learn from the environment, understand it and adapt to it that characterize intelligence. The development of novel machine learning algorithms based on such principles, and trained on very large data sets, is at the heart of the latest technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

More specifically, I research how higher level representations that carry meaning can be constructed autonomously, starting from streams of raw sensory input (such as images and sounds). Similarly to what our brain's neural networks naturally know how to do, this amounts to intelligently modeling the structure of the observed reality, by discovering and exploiting hidden and complex statistical regularities that it follows.