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Joshua Tenenbaum: 'Types of intelligence: why human-like AI is important'
Josh Tenenbaum

Thu Dec 07 04:30 PM -- 05:00 PM (PST) @
in Kinds of intelligence: types, tests and meeting the needs of society »
Event URL: http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/josh.html »

Joshua Tenenbaum is Professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is leader of the Computational Cognitive Science Group, where he studies computational models of human learning and inference. He has numerous influential papers, including 'How to Grow a Mind', exploring how computational models can address deep questions about the nature and origin of human thought. His work combines empirical methods and formal approaches with a focus on probabilistic models, and has narrowed the gap between AI and the capacities of human learners.

Author Information

Josh Tenenbaum (MIT)

Josh Tenenbaum is an Associate Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received his PhD from MIT in 1999, and was an Assistant Professor at Stanford University from 1999 to 2002. He studies learning and inference in humans and machines, with the twin goals of understanding human intelligence in computational terms and bringing computers closer to human capacities. He focuses on problems of inductive generalization from limited data -- learning concepts and word meanings, inferring causal relations or goals -- and learning abstract knowledge that supports these inductive leaps in the form of probabilistic generative models or 'intuitive theories'. He has also developed several novel machine learning methods inspired by human learning and perception, most notably Isomap, an approach to unsupervised learning of nonlinear manifolds in high-dimensional data. He has been Associate Editor for the journal Cognitive Science, has been active on program committees for the CogSci and NIPS conferences, and has co-organized a number of workshops, tutorials and summer schools in human and machine learning. Several of his papers have received outstanding paper awards or best student paper awards at the IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), NIPS, and Cognitive Science conferences. He is the recipient of the New Investigator Award from the Society for Mathematical Psychology (2005), the Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists (2007), and the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology (in the area of cognition and human learning) from the American Psychological Association (2008).

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