Monthly Archives: February 2020

Phil 2.6.20

7:00 – 4:00  ASRC GOES

Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks

  • Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes to learn how to perceive and act upon the world? Recent advances in artificial neural networks have exposed the power of optimizing millions of synaptic weights over millions of observations to operate robustly in real-world contexts. These models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of the world; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over task-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. Counterintuitively, similar to evolutionary processes, over-parameterized models can be simple and parsimonious, as they provide a versatile, robust solution for learning a diverse set of functions. This new family of direct-fit models present a radical challenge to many of the theoretical assumptions in psychology and neuroscience. At the same time, this shift in perspective establishes unexpected links with developmental and ecological psychology.

 

  •  Defense
    • Discussion slides
      • contributions – done
      • designing for populations 1 & 2- done
      • Diversity and resilience- done
      • Non-human agents- done
      • Reflection and reflex- done
      • Ethical considerations- done
      • Ethics of diversity injection
      • Ethics of belief space cartography
  • GOES
    • Status report
  • Get signature from Aaron at 7:30

Phil 2.5.20

7:00 – 5:30 ASRC GOES

  • Social network proximity predicts similar trajectories of psychological states: Evidence from multi-voxel spatiotemporal dynamics put this in the lit review!

    • Temporal trajectories of multivoxel patterns capture meaningful individual differences.

    • Inter-subject similarity in pattern trajectories predicts social network proximity.

    • Friends may be exceptionally similar in how attentional states evolve over time.

    • There are distinct behavioral effects of neural response pattern and magnitude trajectories.

  • Irrational Politics, Unreasonable Culture: Justin Smith and Jessica Riskin held on January 29, 2020
    • Shouting and shaming, lying and trolling: How did we ever learn to speak to one another the way we do now? In matters political and cultural, public and private, on social media and in major newsrooms, it seems as though over the past few years a bizarre and frightening irrationality has taken hold of our discourse. But what is irrationality, and what is that thing—reason—with which we oppose it? 
    • Jessica Riskin is involved in some cross-cultural project at Stanford that is trying to bring the arts and STEM into closer orbits (techies and fuzzies?)? Send an email
    • Justin Smith is interested on the effects of algorithms on thinking. Can’t find any writing, but he gave a talk: “The Algorithmic Production of Social Kinds,” a lecture-performance at DAU, Paris, February 12, 2019.
  • Dissertation
    • Slides
  • Mission drive meeting
    • Send status report to Erik
    • 3/31/20 milestones
      • Evaluate GOES 16 and 17 high-fidelity simulators as training sources for multivariate anomaly detection
        • Evaluate transfer learning from GOES 16 <-> GOES 17
      • Evaluate reaction wheel scenarios on lofi model as training source for multivariate anomaly detection for GOES 17 and GOES 17
        • Evaluate transfer learning between models trained using hifi simulator data