8:00 – 7:00 ASRC GOES

• I have a cold. Yuck!
• How to build a brain from scratch
  • This advanced option course discusses the search for a general theory of learning and inference in biological brains. It draws upon diverse themes in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, machine learning and artificial intelligence research. We begin by posing broad questions. What are brains for, and what does it mean to ask how they “work”? Then, over a series of lectures, we discuss parallel computational approaches in machine learning/AI and psychology/neuroscience, including reinforcement learning, deep learning, and Bayesian methods. We contrast computational and representational approaches to understanding neuroscience data. We ask whether current approaches in machine learning are feasible and scaleable, and which methods – if any – resemble the computations observed in biological brains. We review how high-level cognitive functions – attention, episodic memory, concept formation, reasoning and executive control – are being instantiated in artificial agents, and how their implementation draws upon what we know about the mammalian brain. Finally, we contemplate the outlook for the future, and whether AI will be “solved” in the near future.
• Start writing GVSETS simulation white paper for March 3
• Finish setting up workstation
  • Soooooo, that turned out to be a bigger problem. The way that admin is set up is that there are two levels, an “install software” level, and an “install hardware level”. I had been given the former. When I installed the new SSD, it had to be formatted with NTFS. I could launch the device manager, but could not access the drive. I took the box down to HQ, and their IT folks were mystified. I stopped by the shop that had fixed the power supply, and for another $50, they put the drive in another machine, formatted and named it. Then it worked. Wheee.
  • I then start re-installing software and find that although I can log in as admin, I can’t run anything as admin. That requires going back to HQ so that they can set permissions on the local network, and install a VPN. Now our local network is horrible. There is some kind of whitelist/blacklist filter that is so slow that web pages often timeout rather than load.
  • At this point, I decided that it was easier to reset the machine and start over. So I’ll be doing that for a few days. Today, I got the NVIDIA and CUDA drivers installed.
• Verify TF and multi-gpu optevolver
• ML Seminar