Shows
Brain Space Time Podcast#8 Uri Hasson: Language in the real world for brains and AIUri Hasson runs a lab in Princeton, where he investigates the underlying neural basis of natural language acquisition and processing as it unfolds in the real world. As Uri visited Tübingen (where I am doing my master's), we were able to meet in person. Originally, I planned to talk about his idea of temporal receptive windows, and how different brain regions (e.g. default mode network) operate at different timescales. However, we ended up talking more about Wittgenstein, evolution, and ChatGPT. An underlying thread throughout the conversation was that (for both biological and artificial agents), language is not c...2023-12-1356 minBrain Space Time Podcast#7 Kevin Mitchell: Free Agents (in an evolving block universe)Kevin Mitchell is an Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at the Trinity College Dublin. He recently published his second book, "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will." It's a rigorous defense for why we (and other living systems) have free will, arguing all the way from quantum indeterminacy, to C. elegans, to how humans can form abstracted meanings over very long timescales. We also go beyond the book, exploring how free will links to unresolved questions in physics about the discrepancy of microscopic laws being time-invariant and macroscopic laws having a time asymmetry (entropy increase over time). A...2023-12-051h 20Brain Space Time Podcast#6 Kate Jeffery: Grid cells in 3D, entropy & climate changeKate Jeffery is the head of the school of psychology & neuroscience at the University of Glasgow (formerly at UCL). This episode is all about grid cells (background info), which Kate was already recording in the 1990s. We discuss how grid cells' rate maps differ when the rats climb in 3D spaces. Here we cover anything from cross-species comparisons (bats, birds), to self-organizing dynamics, and symmetry breaking. Kate also shares her (maybe unpopular) thoughts that the hexagonal grid regularity is not functional but a by-product. We also get physics-y by discussing entropy, evolution, complexity and how they link to memory...2023-10-171h 43Brain Space Time Podcast#5 Bernstein conference 2023: Computational neuroscience postersTwo weeks ago, I visited the Bernstein conference in Berlin. I had lots of fun, particularly at the poster sessions, where I met William, Movitz, and Shervin. I met with each of them later and recorded the following conversations (on bark benches again^^).
William Walker (Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, London) had a poster on 'Representations of State in Hippocampus Derive from a Principle of Conditional Independence'. We discuss how current deep learning struggles with generalization, lacks priors, and could benefit by learning latent conditionally independent representations (similar to place cells).
Movitz Lenninger (KTH Royal Institute...2023-10-101h 27Brain Space Time Podcast#4 Paul Middlebrooks: BrainInspired & PodcastingAn episode with my favourite podcast host, Paul Middlebrooks. Paul and I met in Berlin, and talked about his journey away from (and back into) academia and why he started his podcast BrainInspired. Yes, there is a lot of podcast meta-talk in this episode. For example, how science podcasts give you a glimpse into another field (as an outsider) and some advice for fellow podcast hosts. We also get into productivity, self-learning and some big-picture questions on what's holding neuroscience back.
For Apple Podcast users, find books/papers links at: https://akseliilmanen.wixsite.com/akseli-ilmanen/post/pod04
2023-10-0347 minBrain Space Time Podcast#3 ESI SyNC 2023: Bats, memory & interdisciplinary scienceA couple of weeks ago, I visited the ESI SyNC 2023 conference in at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) in Frankfurt, Germany. Their topic was "Linking hypotheses: where neuroscience, computation, and cognition meet".
During the conference, I got talking to Yossi Yovel (Tel-Aviv University) about how different bat species navigate, what their vocalizations tell us about language evolution, and discussed his recent paper on whether we will ever be able to talk to animals. On the last point, I have some strong thoughts - thoughts including Wittgenstein and crows (see my own article here).
I a...2023-09-262h 12Brain Space Time Podcast#2 Saeedeh Sadeghi & Irena Arslanova: Heart and time perceptionThis episode, I talk to Saeedeh Sadeghi (Cornell University) and Irena Arslanova (Royal Holloway - London) about the heart and time perception. If you have ever been in a car accident, you might have felt as if time was slowing down. Some previous studies have tried to explain this phenomenon and argued that a state of 'arousal' may slow down time (subjectively). It's a bit more complicated than that. This year, Saeedeh and Irena published two papers showing how not average heart rate but heart dynamics on the sub-second scale influence time perception. Within a single cardiac cycle, time...2023-08-182h 01
The Embodied AI PodcastSecond podcast on Brain, Space and Time!Hi! I started a second podcast (the Brain Space Time Podcast), available here! Listen to this episode to find about it!
Timestamps:
(00:00) - What is the Brain Space Time Podcast about?
(01:39) - The podcast logo explained.
(05:28) - Getting in touch.
Links
Henri Bergson's 1986 Matter and memory PDF (Cone figure on p. 61)
Uri Hasson on temporal receptive windows paper
Follow me
For updates on new episode releases, follow me on Twitter.
...2023-07-1405 minBrain Space Time Podcast#1 Georg Northoff: Spatiotemporal neuroscienceIn the first episode of the Brain Space Time Podcast, I talk to Georg Northoff, a neuroscientist, psychiatrist and philosopher based in Ottawa, Canada. Georg argues that the self and time are fundamental to how the brain constructs a model of the world. We start off with the role of spontaneous activity in the brain, including the role of the default mode network, although Georg might convince you that you shouldn't think of it as one of many networks but as a baseline. We also dig deep into philosophy, going back to Kant, Leibniz and even Heraclitus. Georg argues...2023-07-142h 14Brain Space Time Podcast#1 Georg Northoff: Spatiotemporal neuroscienceIn the first episode of the Brain Space Time Podcast, I talk to Georg Northoff, a neuroscientist, psychiatrist and philosopher based in Ottawa, Canada. Georg argues that the self and time are fundamental to how the brain constructs a model of the world. We start off with the role of spontaneous activity in the brain, including the role of the default mode network, although Georg might convince you that you shouldn't think of it as one of many networks but as a baseline. We also dig deep into philosophy, going back to Kant, Leibniz and even Heraclitus. Georg argues...2023-07-112h 14Brain Space Time PodcastWelcome to the Brain Space Time Podcast!In this short episode, I give a rough outline of what the Brain Space Time podcast will be about!
Timestamps:
(00:00) - What is the Brain Space Time Podcast about?
(01:39) - The podcast logo explained.
(05:28) - Getting in touch.
Links
Show notes for this episode (with Bergson's cone figure)
Henri Bergson's 1986 Matter and memory PDF (Cone figure on p. 61)
Uri Hasson on temporal receptive windows paper
Follow me2023-02-0605 min
The Embodied AI Podcast#7 Tony Zador: The Embodied Turing Test, Genomic Bottlenecks, Molecular ConnectomicsTony has a lab at Cold Spring Harbour, New York. Using rodents, his lab studies the neural circuits underlying auditory decisions. He is also developing new technologies for connectome sequencing and does some NeuroAI work. In the episode, after a detour on language and the Costa Rican singing mouse, we discuss his recent paper on 'The Embodied Turing Test' and Moravec's paradox; the idea that what we find hard is easy for AI, and vice versa. We explore how Tony's work in creating a rodent decision-making model might inform a virtual platform for embodied animal-like agents. Evolution is an...2023-01-151h 29The Embodied AI Podcast#6 Alex Lascarides: Linguistics from Frege to Settlers of CatanAlex is a professor and the director of the Institution for Language, Cognition and Computation at Edinburgh. She is interested in discourse coherence, gestures, complex games and interactive task learning. After we find out about Alex's background and geek out over Ludwig Wittgenstein, she tells us about Dynamic Semantics and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). SDRT considers discourse as actions that change the state space of the world and requires agents to infer coherence in the discourse. Then, I initiate a discussion between Felix Hill and Alex by asking her about her opinion on compositionality and playing a clip...2022-07-151h 36The Embodied AI Podcast#5 Felix Hill: Grounded Language, Transformers, and DeepMindFelix is a research scientist at DeepMind. He is interested in grounded language understanding and natural language processing (NLP). After finding out about Felix's background, we bring up compositionality and explore why natural language is NonCompositional (also, the name of Felix's blog). Then, Felix tells us a bit about his work in Cambridge on abstract vs concrete concepts and gives us a quick crash course on the role of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), long short-term memory (LSTMs), and transformers in language models. Next, we talk about Jeff Elman's landmark paper 'Finding Structure in Time' and how neural networks can...2022-07-061h 34
The Embodied AI Podcast#4 Beren Millidge: Reinforcement Learning through Active InferenceBeren is a postdoc in Oxford with a background in machine learning and computational neuroscience. He is interested in Active Inference (related to the Free Energy Principle) and how the cortex can perform long-term credit assignment as deep artificial neural networks do. We start off with some shorter questions on the Free Energy Principle and its background concepts. Next, we get onto the exploration vs exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning and Beren's strategy on how to maximize expected reward from restaurant visits - it's a long episode :=). We also discuss multimodal representations, shallow minima, autism, and enactivism. Then, we...2022-06-291h 35The Embodied AI Podcast#3 Mark Sprevak: 4E, The Chinese Room Argument, Predictive CodingMark is a philosopher of computation and cognitive science at Edinburgh. We start off the conversation exploring why we shouldn't attribute computation to stones and talk about instances of distributed cognition in classical antiquity. Then, we discuss the relationship between functionalism and extended cognition with the paradigmatic example of Otto's notebook and some implications for deep learning researchers. Next off is the famous Chinese Room Argument and how the 'Robot Reply' illustrates the need for embodiment when going from 'cat' syntax to cat semantics. After a quick rendezvous with the frame problem (see also Ep1), Hubert Dreyfus and Heideggerian...2022-05-241h 24The Embodied AI Podcast#2 Barbara Webb: Insect RoboticsBarbara is a professor of Biorobotics at Edinburgh. We start with a quick philosophical exploration of robots using chairs, James Gibson's concept 'affordances', and whether insects have meaning. Next, we talk about how robots can be used to test hypotheses in biology. For most of the episode, we discuss the incredible things crickets, ants and the mushroom body can do. We explore some interesting questions such as: How does embodiment in crickets replace the need for neural processing? How do ants integrate different sensory modalities? Do insects have consciousness? And can we find associative general-purpose brain regions in the...2022-03-111h 01The Embodied AI Podcast#1 Ron Chrisley: Embodied AI, Non-Conceptual Content, AI CreativityIn the first episode of the Embodied AI Podcast, Ron tells us about his journey from Stanford to machine learning and the people that inspired him to dig deeper on philosophical questions around embodiment. Ron lays out 4 dimensions to think about Embodied AI and situates its role in the history of AI - mainly the move away from Symbolic AI. We take a close look at his 2003 paper on Embodied Artificial Intelligence, making connections to the relevance problem, Lewis Carroll's What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and current matching learning. Ron also discusses his work on non-conceptual c...2022-02-181h 29
The Embodied AI PodcastWelcome to the Embodied AI Podcast!A short episode, where I discuss what the podcast is about.
My Twitter
Email - lai24@bath.ac.uk
Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy overview
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus PDF
Philosophical Investigations PDF
Hubert Dreyfus:
What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason book
Music Credit
https://uppbeat.io/t/torus/progression
License code: NT6SRVLHJCBXH1YE2021-12-1401 min