ALBA webinar series - Breaking down the ivory tower: Ep. 4 Maria José Diógenes
With this webinar series, the ALBA Disability & Accessibility Working Group aims to bring down the ivory tower of ableism among the brain research community, one extraordinary neuroscientist at a time. These webinars give a platform to scientists with disabilities across the globe and neuroscience disciplines, while reflecting on how to promote inclusive working environments and accessibility to research. For this 4th episode, Dr. Maria José Diógenes (iMM - ULisboa, PT) will talk about how her personal story changed her professional life: from the pharmacy to the laboratory bench and from ageing to Rett Syndrome.
ALBA webinar series - Breaking down the ivory tower: Ep. 3 Donna Rose Addis
With this webinar series, the ALBA Disability & Accessibility Working Group aims to bring down the ivory tower of ableism among the brain research community, one extraordinary neuroscientist at a time. These webinars give a platform to scientists with disabilities across the globe and neuroscience disciplines, while reflecting on how to promote inclusive working environments and accessibility to research. For this 3rd episode, Dr. Donna Rose Addis (Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest & University of Toronto, Canada) will talk about her research and experience.
Walk the talk: concrete actions to promote diversity in neuroscience in Latin America
Building upon the webinar "What are the main barriers to succeed in brain sciences in Latin America?" (February 2021) and the paper "Addressing the opportunity gap in the Latin American neuroscience community" (Silva, A., Iyer, K., Cirulli, F. et al. Nat Neurosci August 2022), this ALBA-IBRO Webinar is the next chapter in our journey towards fostering inclusivity and diversity in neuroscience in Latin America. The webinar is designed to go beyond theoretical discussions and provide tangible solutions. We will showcase 3-4 best practice case studies, shining a spotlight on real-life actions and campaigns implemented at the institutional level, be it within government bodies, universities, or other organisations. Our goal is to empower neuroscientists across Latin America by equipping them with practical knowledge they can apply in their own institutions and countries.
ALBA webinar series - Breaking down the ivory tower: Ep. 2 Philip Haydon
With this webinar series, the ALBA Disability & Accessibility Working Group aims to bring down the ivory tower of ableism among the brain research community, one extraordinary neuroscientist at a time. These webinars give a platform to scientists with disabilities across the globe and neuroscience disciplines, while reflecting on how to promote inclusive working environments and accessibility to research. For this 2nd episode, Prof. Philip Haydon (Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, USA) will talk about his research and experience. Prof. Philip runs an active laboratory researching a multitude of neurological disorders (including epilepsy). He is also President of Sail For Epilepsy. His mission is to inspire people with epilepsy, raise funds to support research for a cure, promote awareness of epilepsy and educate the public.
A Toolkit to Succeed in Neuroscience in Africa - an IBRO-ALBA-WWN-SANS Webinar
Following up on last year's webinar - What it takes to succeed as a neuroscientist in Africa, this panel discussion aims at creating a guide to the skill set needed to be a neuroscientist in the African continent. Chairs and panelists will illustrate different areas of expertise as part of the "Toolkit" by matching them to real life experience and solutions that they had to find while building their career as scientists.
ALBA-WWN Webinar: What it takes to succeed as a neuroscientist in Africa
In this webinar, the ALBA Network & World Women in Neuroscience partner to address equity, inclusion & diversity issues across the Sub-Saharan African neuroscience community. The panel discussion will explore the challenges and biases faced by African neuroscientists while establishing their careers - focusing on a lack of mentoring and networking but also on the difficulties to raise funding - as well as display the strengths present in the region, which can be exploited to find solutions. Registration is free but required: https://www.alba.network/alba-wwn-webinar-africa
Challenges and opportunities for neuroscientists in the MENA region
As part of its webinar series on region-specific diversity issues, the ALBA Network is organizing a panel discussion to explore the challenges and biases faced by neuroscientists while establishing their research groups and careers in the MENA region, from an academic and cultural perspective. This will be followed by highlights of success stories, unique region-specific opportunities for research collaborations and recommendations to improve representation of MENA neuroscientists in the global stage.
Beyond the binding problem: From basic affordances to symbolic thought
Human cognitive abilities seem qualitatively different from the cognitive abilities of other primates, a difference Penn, Holyoak, and Povinelli (2008) attribute to role-based relational reasoning—inferences and generalizations based on the relational roles to which objects (and other relations) are bound, rather than just the features of the objects themselves. Role-based relational reasoning depends on the ability to dynamically bind arguments to relational roles. But dynamic binding cannot be sufficient for relational thinking: Some non-human animals solve the dynamic binding problem, at least in some domains; and many non-human species generalize affordances to completely novel objects and scenes, a kind of universal generalization that likely depends on dynamic binding. If they can solve the dynamic binding problem, then why can they not reason about relations? What are they missing? I will present simulations with the LISA model of analogical reasoning (Hummel & Holyoak, 1997, 2003) suggesting that the missing pieces are multi-role integration (the capacity to combine multiple role bindings into complete relations) and structure mapping (the capacity to map different systems of role bindings onto one another). When LISA is deprived of either of these capacities, it can still generalize affordances universally, but it cannot reason symbolically; granted both abilities, LISA enjoys the full power of relational (symbolic) thought. I speculate that one reason it may have taken relational reasoning so long to evolve is that it required evolution to solve both problems simultaneously, since neither multi-role integration nor structure mapping appears to confer any adaptive advantage over simple role binding on its own.
Representations of abstract relations in infancy
Abstract relations are considered the pinnacle of human cognition, allowing analogical and logical reasoning, and possibly setting humans apart from other animal species. Such relations cannot be represented in a perceptual code but can easily be represented in a propositional language of thought, where relations between objects are represented by abstract discrete symbols. Focusing on the abstract relations same and different, I will show that (1) there is a discontinuity along ontogeny with respect to the representations of abstract relations, but (2) young infants already possess representations of same and different. Finally, (3) I will investigate the format of representation of abstract relations in young infants, arguing that those representations are not discrete, but rather built by juxtaposing abstract representations of entities.
Transforming task representations
Humans can adapt to a novel task on our first try. By contrast, artificial intelligence systems often require immense amounts of data to adapt. In this talk, I will discuss my recent work (https://www.pnas.org/content/117/52/32970) on creating deep learning systems that can adapt on their first try by exploiting relationships between tasks. Specifically, the approach is based on transforming a representation for a known task to produce a representation for the novel task, by inferring and then using a higher order function that captures a relationship between the tasks. This approach can be interpreted as a type of analogical reasoning. I will show that task transformation can allow systems to adapt to novel tasks on their first try in domains ranging from card games, to mathematical objects, to image classification and reinforcement learning. I will discuss the analogical interpretation of this approach, an analogy between levels of abstraction within the model architecture that I refer to as homoiconicity, and what this work might suggest about using deep-learning models to infer analogies more generally.
Deep reinforcement learning and its neuroscientific implications
The last few years have seen some dramatic developments in artificial intelligence research. What implications might these have for neuroscience? Investigations of this question have, to date, focused largely on deep neural networks trained using supervised learning, in tasks such as image classification. However, there is another area of recent AI work which has so far received less attention from neuroscientists, but which may have more profound neuroscientific implications: Deep reinforcement learning. Deep RL offers a rich framework for studying the interplay among learning, representation and decision-making, offering to the brain sciences a new set of research tools and a wide range of novel hypotheses. I’ll provide a high level introduction to deep RL, discuss some recent neuroscience-oriented investigations from my group at DeepMind, and survey some wider implications for research on brain and behavior.