Forward
Dear Participants,
The Symposium on Biological and Computational
Perspectives on Intelligent System, like its predecessor in 1998, is motivated at the high
level by the challenges of understanding neurobiological systems as machinery
evolved for making valuable decisions under uncertainty. We have worked over the last year
to organize a meeting that would bring together a set of passionate
people drawn from the biological and the computational sciences to discuss
questions about systems that sense, learn, perform inference, and
make decisions under inescapable uncertainties—whether the systems are built
upon a biological substrate or are based on computational representations
and algorithmic procedures. We hope that the meeting will stimulate
real-time discussions and insights, as well as to
catalyze longer-term syntheses and efforts that bring together
biological and computational perspectives on shared questions. The program overall takes invertebrate neurobiology
as a valuable focus of attention—a focus aimed at better understanding
invertebrate intelligence, as well as at making progress on vertebrate
intelligence. Our intuition is that
vertebrate intelligence, including the capabilities we know as human intelligence, likely
leverages key innovations implemented within “older,” and potentially simpler
and more transparent neurobiological fabric.
When we organized a conference under
the same title seven years ago, we were uncertain but optimistic that
valuable things might come out of an attempt to weave together
the brightest minds in neurobiology, with scholars in computer
science, decision science, statistics, and control theory. Given
the multiple influences that the 1998 meeting had, we have learned that
our optimism was well founded. We hope
that this meeting will have similar positive interdisciplinary influences on
addressing the challenges of understanding intelligent systems.
Eric Horvitz and Dennis Willows
Microsoft Research and
June 2005