Principles Underlying the Construction of Brain-Based Devices
Thursday, May 18, 2006
6:30 P.M. - 8:00 P.M.Join your colleagues at the next meeting of The San Diego Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), featuring Jeff Krichmar who is a research fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego where he is currently a Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology. Jeff is the lead designer for Nomad, a soccer playing robot built on a Segway platform.
There will be light snacks and great door prizes ... please reserve your seat (see below) before it's too late!
We will meet at 6:30PM at The Neurosciences Institute, 10640 John Jay Hopkins Drive, San Diego in the UCSD area. The meeting cost is $3 for reservations paid in advance via PayPal or $5 at the door -- free for chapter members.
The meeting is open to the public. For more information, call (858) 452-8701 or visit http://www.sdacm.org .
(We are also pleased to acknowledge the generous support of Sun Microsystems.)
Bring your colleagues and friends -- we hope to see you there!
Seat Reservations
Please reserve a seat using our new reservations and payment form -- there is a discount for reserving and paying using this form.
If you cannot use the reservations form (it saves us a lot of work if you can), send us an email or call (858) 452-8701.
Please reserve your seat by May 17..
Abstract:
Without a doubt the most sophisticated behavior seen in biological agents is demonstrated by organisms whose behavior is guided by a nervous system. Thus, the construction of behaving devices based on principles of nervous systems may have much to offer. Our group has built series of brain-based devices (BBDs) over the last 15 years to provide a heuristic for studying brain function by embedding neurobiological principles on a physical platform capable of interacting with the real world. These BBDs have been used to study perception, operant conditioning, episodic and spatial memory, and motor control through the simulation of brain regions such as the visual cortex, the dopaminergic reward system, the hippocampus, and the cerebellum. Following the brain-based model, we argue that an intelligent machine should be constrained by the following design principles: (i) it should incorporate a simulated brain with detailed neuroanatomy and neural dynamics that controls behavior and shapes memory, (ii) it should organize the unlabeled signals it receives from the environment into categories without a priori knowledge or instruction, (iii) it should have a physical instantiation, which allows for active sensing and autonomous movement in the environment, (iv) it should engage in a task that is initially constrained by minimal set of innate behaviors or reflexes, (v) it should have a means to adapt the device's behavior, called value systems, when an important environmental event occurs, and (vi) it should allow comparisons with experimental data acquired from animal nervous systems. Like the brain, these devices operate according to selectional principles through which they form categorical memory, associate categories with innate value, and adapt to the environment. Moreover, this approach may provide the groundwork for the development of intelligent machines that follow neurobiological rather than computational principles in their construction.
Presenter Bio:
Jeffrey L. Krichmar received a B.S. in Computer Science in 1983 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a M.S. in Computer Science from The George Washington University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Computational Sciences and Informatics from George Mason University in 1997. Dr. Krichmar spent 15 years as a software engineer on projects ranging from the PATRIOT Missile System at the Raytheon Corporation to Air Traffic Control for the Federal Systems Division of IBM. In 1997, he became an assistant professor at The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University. In 1999, he became a research fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego where he is currently a Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute. His research interests include biologically plausible models of learning and memory, the effect of neural architecture on neural function, and testing theories of the nervous system with Brain-Based Devices that interact with the environment. Dr. Krichmar and his colleagues at The Neurosciences Institute have successfully constructed Brain Based Devices, robotic devices whose behavior is controlled by a simulated nervous system, to test theories of the nervous system having to do with perceptual categorization, primary and secondary conditioning, visual binding, motor control, and memory. A recent article describing The Neurosciences Institute's Brain-Based Device laboratory was featured in New Scientist magazine (November 2005). Dr. Krichmar is author of approximately 40 scientific articles, has organized international conferences on brain-based robotics, and chair of a new Robotic Soccer league which involves Segway robots interacting with humans.
Meeting Charge
The meeting costs $5 payable at the door or $3 payable via advanced reservation using our reservations and payment form at -- chapter members get in free. (You can save approximately 50% by purchasing an annual SDACM Membership at the door for only $12 -- or $10 using the reservations and payment form -- see membership policy for more details.)
RSVP Policy
We strongly encourage you to let us know if you plan to attend this meeting. We expect this meeting to be very well attended, and we may run out of space. In that case, attendees with reservations will be given admittance and seating preference. See RSVP policy for more details.
Location
The Neurosciences Institute
10640 John Jay Hopkins Drive
San Diego, California 92121
Directions
From Interstate 5, exit at Genesee Avenue and go west for about 0.8 mile to the second stoplight (not counting any at the I-5 exit). Turn right (north) onto John Jay Hopkins Drive. Turn left at the second opportunity (about 0.1 mile) into the Institute's driveway. (The first opportunity to turn left is into an obviously gated parking lot. If the gates are raised, you may park in that lot.) In the driveway, bear right into the Visitor Parking area. Walk across the central plaza to the three-story building at the north end.
Free parking anywhere.
A map can be found here.
