Resources for Bio-Inspired AI - Video

Here at Simibrum we love building bio-inspired artificial intelligence systems. It appears we are not alone. Over the last ten years, we have seen a huge increase in the number of resources available to researchers - you no longer need to be working in a world-beating research institution or a technology giant. In a series of short posts, we will set out some of the resources that have inspired us.

We will start with videos and video playlists.

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Brains, Minds and Machines Seminar Series

The Center for Brains, Minds and Machines is one of our favourite cross-discipline research organisations. It combines approaches from computer science, neuroscience and cognitive science. It is often weighted towards the biological side, making it useful for researchers coming more from the engineering side.

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Computation Theories of the Brain

The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing is another research institute that is opening up new pathways in multi-disciplinary research. They have many videos in different areas of theoretical computer science, but one of our favourites is a 2018 workshop on the Computation Theories of the Brain. It introduces many different concepts that are often absent from mainstream machine learning, such as neuronal spiking, synaptic plasticity and predictive coding.

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Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning

2017 was a great year for natural language processing. In what appears in hindsight to be an unusual one-off act of largesse, both Stanford and Oxford released the video lectures for their courses in Deep Natural Language processing free online. Both courses feature lectures from some of the world's leading experts in natural language processing.

The Oxford course, including PDFs of the slides and links to the videos, can be found at this Github repository.

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Convolutional Neural Networks and Vision

Stanford also has a great set of online lectures covering convolutional neural networks and vision from their 2017 class.

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Brains Explained

This is a small set of videos - just over an hour collectively - that explain core concepts of the brain using simple diagrams. We particularly like the clear functional descriptions of the hippocampus and the basal ganglia.

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3 Blue 1 Brown

We all wish we had a maths teacher like Grant Sanderson. Under the moniker 3 Blue 1 Brown, and a deceptive simple set of animations, Grant very clearly explains some of the core mathematical theories behind modern machine learning systems. We are particularly fond of his unique explanations of the Fourier Transformation and visualising more than three dimensions.

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Understanding the Human Brain (from the BBC)

We lose track of actually which BBC app or website we are meant to officially use but there is a treasure trove of short context hidden in the archives.

One of our favourite is this BBC Ideas playlist featuring 26 short videos - just over 2 hours - with some bite-sized animations. There are also multiple other playlists on YouTube.

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Numenta and Hierarchical Temporal Memory

Numenta is the brain child of Jeff Hawkins, who used the millions of dollars he received from basically inventing the smartphone at Palm to set up a neuroscience research institute. Jeff and his team have been outputting papers for over 15 years now, and whether or not you agree with his approach, his general theories of bio-inspired computing are at least consistent with the latest findings in neuroscience. They provide a rare alternative outlook from the usual resources on deep learning, and many of their approaches are applicable in other theories of brain-based computation.

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Going Philosophical

A little light relief to end with.

No aspiring artificial intelligence researcher should be without a healthy dose of philosophical education. Our favourite introduction to philosophy comes in the form of this set of armchair interview by Bryan Magee. It is remarkable to think these shows were once prime-time viewing on British television. Not only are complex philosophical theories explained for the lay viewer, but you also have the bonus of witnessing some of the great philosophers of the twentieth century in action.