Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence

Catalog description

Without neuroscience, none of the artificial intelligence systems that have become part of our daily lives - ChatGPT, Siri, facial recognition - would exist. In this course, we will explore how neuroscience made our contemporary AI world possible and how AI is changing the way scientists study the brain. In the first half of the course, we will walk through key developments in the history of contemporary, neural network-based AI systems and discover how each of them has its roots in scientific discoveries about how the brain works. In the second half of the course, we will learn about how AI tools have themselves become key to neuroscientific research. We will conclude the course by discussing whether neuroscience still has a role to play in the development of contemporary AI systems. Throughout the course, we will cover key scientific papers from both neuroscience and machine learning and gain experience with reading primary scientific literature. Students with a background in Python will have the opportunity to implement the machine learning approaches we discuss themselves, with instructor support. Prerequisites: High school biology, algebra II, some familiarity with matrix algebra