I Want To Believe, page-1522

Simon Thorpe has a couple of presentations coming up:
https://www.unitn.it/drcimec/104/colloquia
and:
https://edu.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/research-and-innovation/science-week/6-plenary-lectures-781981.htm?RH=1550237818168#Tuesday

Finding repeating patterns: A key to intelligence in man and machine?

Humans are incredibly good at spotting repeating patterns. For example, when presented with a stream of novel images at rates of up to 120 frames a second, an image repeated between 2 and 5 times can subsequently be picked out of a set of four images - where the other 3 have all been seen just once (Thunell & Thorpe, in press). Similarly impressive levels of performance have been seen with auditory snippets presented at rates of 20 per second - again, a few repeats are enough to make the sound easy to pick out. This suggests that this ability to detect patterns that repeat is a general feature of the brain. Parallel modelling work has shown that a modified Spike-Time Dependent Plasticity Rule using binary synapses can allow neurons to learn to detect repeating patterns, again with only a few repeats, and these ideas have been been validated using artificial systems with thousands of neurons. We would like to suggest that this sort of unsupervised learning could be a key to biological intelligence, and could provide a radical alternative to the supervised deep learning techniques that currently dominate the field.

Simon THORPE Director of the Toulouse Mind & Brain Institute and Brain & Cognition Research Center (CerCo) Simon Thorpe’s research is a mix of neurophysiolgy, psychophyiscs, computer modelling and theoretical work. He is currently half way through a 5 year ERC advanced grant called “The M4 project : Memory Mechanisms in Man and Machine”, which aims to understand how we can store sensory memories that can last for an entire lifetime. The main hypothesis is that we store memories in “grandmother cells” that can remain totally silent for months or years – neocortical dark matter. Recruited by the CNRS in 1983, he moved from Paris to Toulouse in 1993 to help create the Brain & Cognition Research Center (CerCo). He became the lab director in 2014, and also took over the direction of the Toulouse Mind & Brain Institute and Brain in January 2016.

Memory Mechanisms in Man & Machine
https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/events/docs/Simon_Thorpe-Memory-Mechanisms-Man-machine.pdf







NICE 2019 Presentation
https://niceworkshop.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/NICE-2019-Day-1c-Kris-Carlson.pdf