BI 200 Grace Hwang and Joe Monaco: The Future of NeuroAI
Brain Inspired
Intro
This chapter explores the integration of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, emphasizing the Neuro AI concept to advance both fields. It highlights the Brain Initiative's goals and a workshop focused on collaboration and future prospects in cognitive sciences.
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Joe Monaco and Grace Hwang co-organized a recent workshop I participated in, the 2024 BRAIN NeuroAI Workshop. You may have heard of the BRAIN Initiative, but in case not, BRAIN is is huge funding effort across many agencies, one of which is the National Institutes of Health, where this recent workshop was held. The BRAIN Initiative began in 2013 under the Obama administration, with the goal to support developing technologies to help understand the human brain, so we can cure brain based diseases.
BRAIN Initiative just became a decade old, with many successes like recent whole brain connectomes, and discovering the vast array of cell types. Now the question is how to move forward, and one area they are curious about, that perhaps has a lot of potential to support their mission, is the recent convergence of neuroscience and AI... or NeuroAI. The workshop was designed to explore how NeuroAI might contribute moving forward, and to hear from NeuroAI folks how they envision the field moving forward. You'll hear more about that in a moment.
That's one reason I invited Grace and Joe on. Another reason is because they co-wrote a position paper a while back that is impressive as a synthesis of lots of cognitive sciences concepts, but also proposes a specific level of abstraction and scale in brain processes that may serve as a base layer for computation. The paper is called Neurodynamical Computing at the Information Boundaries, of Intelligent Systems, and you'll learn more about that in this episode.
- Joe's NIH page.
- Grace's NIH page.
- Twitter:
- Joe: @j_d_monaco
- Related papers
- Mentioned
- A historical survey of algorithms and hardware architectures for neural-inspired and neuromorphic computing applications.
- Recalling Lashley and reconsolidating Hebb.
- BRAIN NeuroAI Workshop (Nov 12–13)
- Neuromorphic Principles in Biomedicine and Healthcare Workshop (Oct 21–22)
- BRAIN Investigators Meeting 2020 Symposium & Perspective Paper
- NSF/CIRC
Read the transcript.
0:00 - Intro 25:45 - NeuroAI Workshop - neuromorphics 33:31 - Neuromorphics and theory 49:19 - Reflections on the workshop 54:22 - Neurodynamical computing and information boundaries 1:01:04 - Perceptual control theory 1:08:56 - Digital twins and neural foundation models 1:14:02 - Base layer of computation
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