Event
Booz Allen Hamilton Colloquium: Louis Scheffer, "Learning From Life"
Friday, September 23, 2016
3:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m.
1110 Kim Engineering Building (Stanley Zupnik Hall)
Sandra Nicholes
301 405 3114
snichol@umd.edu
The Electrical & Computer Engineering Distinguished Colloquium Series Hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton
Dr. Louis Scheffer
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Janelia Research Campus
Janelia Principal Scientist
Title:
Learning From Life
Abstract:
"Despite a half century of concerted effort, our best hardware and software combined still struggles to perform tasks that living organisms do effortlessly. Examples include object recognition, generalizing from few examples, and orchestrating collective behavior. For these and similar problems, decades of applying more and more computer power have realized only limited gains, making it clear the root problem is our lack of understanding of how to approach these tasks. One obvious path to cracking these problems is to understand how the brain solves them, but until now, this has always been at least as difficult as improving existing algorithms. However, modern tools are finally becoming equal to the task of researching the brain, while progress on improving existing techniques remains incremental. So perhaps the most productive approach towards significant improvements in our hardware and software is to understand how the brain works, then copy these capabilities into man-made systems. Along these lines, we look at a few examples of how software and hardware might evolve, based upon what we already know of the brain."
Bio:
Lou Scheffer was trained as a EE at Caltech and Stanford. He spent the next 30 years designing both integrated circuits, and the software tools used to design them, at Hewlett Packard and Cadence. In 2008, he switched fields, moving to studying the brain at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. There his research interests include methods to derive the detailed structure of the brain, and using this information to try to figure out how it works. His outside interests include SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life, and science education. He is the author of the usual collection of papers, books, and patents.
