Biological and Computational Perspectives on Intelligent Systems
Microsoft Research and University of Washington
Welcome to the home page for the 2005 Symposium on Biological and Computational Perspectives on Intelligent Systems. The invitation-only symposium will focus on presentations and discussions aimed at clarifying and addressing fundamental questions about intelligent systems, through a synthesis of insights from neurobiology, computer science, decision science, and control theory. Our overall goal is to catalyze connections and interdisciplinary thinking between neurobiology and the decision and computational sciences, taking invertebrate nervous systems as a compelling focus for making progress. With the motivating challenge of understanding neurobiological systems as machinery evolved for decisions under uncertainty, we seek a sharing of ideas between leading neurobiologists and researchers in decision science, computer science, and control theory.
The 2005 meeting comes 7 years after a predecessor symposium that we organized in August 1998 under the same title. Strong positive feedback from attendees and new research directions inspired by that meeting compelled us to put together another symposium. Numerous advances have come since the last meeting, some from attendees of the meeting and their teams. The intervening years have also seen some growing interest within neurobiology of the decision making under uncertainty perspective. We are organizing the forthcoming meeting to reflect on advances, and to share new directions and ongoing challenges.
The program will begin with a reception on Tuesday evening, June 7, and will continue through Friday afternoon, June 10, 2005. Although the technical program will end on Friday afternoon, we invite attendees to stay on for a Friday afternoon whale watching cruise and dinner, and plan to depart for free time on the island or to head back on Saturday morning, following breakfast.
You can jump to specific information about the 2005 Symposium on Biological and Computational Perspectives on Intelligent Systems by clicking on the following topics. Please check back as this list of relevant links will evolve as the meeting nears:
Eric Horvitz
Adaptive Systems & Interaction
Microsoft Research
horvitz@microsoft.com
Dennis Willows
Friday Harbor Laboratories
University of Washington
dwillows@u.washington.edu
There have been meetings and special interest groups on modeling among biologists and meetings, largely among computer scientists, e.g., under the herald of computational neuroscience. However, we found great opportunities in bringing together, in an intimate workshop setting, leaders from neurobiology and researchers working more broadly within the computational, control, and decision sciences, including scientists who call computational neuroscience their home.
The forthcoming meeting, 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 to 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.
The meeting will also be featured as a Friday Harbor Laboratories Centennial Symposium, one of several key meetings being held during a year of festivities marking the centennial anniversary of Friday Harbor Laboratories.
Rachel will be overseeing all travel arrangements and reimbursements; please contact her with any question or special requests, needs. Please contact Kathy Carlson at Doug Fox Travel (kathy.carlson@dougfoxtravel.com) with a cc: to Michael Henrichs of Doug Fox Travel (michael.henrichs@dougfoxtravel.com) about booking your travel. Please contact them directly but feel free to also cc: or separately message Rachel Anderson on any questions. Please see this link for travel information.
Invitees are invited to travel between Friday Harbor Laboratories and Seattle via a spectacular seaplane voyage. We are planning a Friday afternoon whale watching cruise and dinner after the main meeting. We recommend that attendees interested in staying on for the Friday afternoon cruise should plan to stay over Friday evening and to depart on Saturday morning following breakfast.
Details of the program are available here.