AI for Neuroscience & Neuroscience for AI

par

Irina Rish

 AI Foundations department
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Mercredi 19 septembre 2018, 10:00-12:00, Salle 3195, Pavillon André-Aisenstadt

La conférence sera présentée en anglais

Résumé:

AI and neuroscience share the same age-old goal: to understand the essence of intelligence. Thus,
despite different tools used and different questions explored by those disciplines, both have a lot
to learn from each other. In this talk, I will summarize some of our recent projects which explore
both directions, AI for neuro and neuro for AI. AI for neuro involves using machine learning to
recognize mental states and identify statistical biomarkers of various mental disorders from
heterogeneous data (neuroimaging, wearables, speech), as well as applications of our recently
proposed hashing-based representation learning to dialog generation in depression therapy. Neuro
for AI implies drawing inspirations from neuroscience to develop better machine learning
algorithms. In particular, I will focus on the continual (lifelong) learning objective, and discuss
several examples of neuro-inspired approaches, including (1) neurogenetic online model adaptation
in nonstationary environments, (2) more biologically plausible alternatives to backpropagation,
e.g., local optimization for neural net learning via alternating minimization with auxiliary
activation variables, and co-activation memory, (3) modeling reward-driven attention and
attention-driven reward in contextual bandit setting, as well as (4) modeling and forecasting
behavior of coupled nonlinear dynamical systems such as brain (from calcium imaging and fMRI) using
a combination of analytical van der Pol model with LSTMs, especially in small-data regimes, where
such hybrid approach outperforms both of its components used separately.

Bio :

Irina Rish is a researcher at the AI Foundations department of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
She received MS in Applied Mathematics from Moscow Gubkin Institute, Russia, and PhD in Computer
Science from the University of California, Irvine. Her areas of expertise include artificial
intelligence and machine learning, with a particular focus on probabilistic graphical models,
sparsity and compressed sensing, active learning, and their applications to various domains,
ranging from diagnosis and performance management of distributed computer systems (“autonomic
computing”) to predictive modeling and statistical biomarker discovery in neuroimaging and other
biological data. Irina has published over 70 research papers, several book chapters, two edited
books, and a monograph on Sparse Modeling, taught several tutorials and organized multiple
workshops at machine-learning conferences, including NIPS, ICML and ECML. She holds over 26 patents
and several IBM awards. Irina currently serves on the editorial board of the Artificial
Intelligence Journal (AIJ). As an adjunct professor at the EE Department of Columbia University,
she taught several advanced graduate courses on statistical learning and sparse signal modeling.