we will run a workshop on Bio-inspired active AI on Wed. 20 July 2022 at CNS*2022 in Melbourne.
The details of the workshop topic are below and a preliminary list of invited talks is at
We have time for some contributed talks and invite submissions of short titles/ abstracts.
Recent advances in AI and notably in deep learning, have proven incredibly successful in creating solutions to specific complex
problems (e.g. beating the best human players at Go, and driving cars through cities). But as we learn more about these approaches, their limitations are becoming more apparent in terms of high energy consumption, fragility, and lack of transferability between
tasks.
These limitations are particularly apparent when contrasted with naturally evolved intelligence. While no animals can play Go
or drive cars, they are incredibly good at doing what they have evolved to do. For instance, ants learn how to forage effectively despite their tiny brains and minimal exploration of their world. We argue this difference comes about because natural intelligence
is a property of closed-loop brain-body-environment interactions. Evolved innate behaviours in concert with specialised sensors and neural circuits extract and encode task-relevant information with maximal efficiency, aided by mechanisms of selective attention
that focus learning on task-relevant features.
In this workshop, we will explore how we can learn from mini-brains, and computational models to better understand intelligence
and pave the pathway to building better AI.