This course provides an overview of intelligence, including how the human brain produces intelligent behavior and more importantly how the understanding of human intelligence would help to create intelligent machines. To this end, we will introduce how human intelligence emerges from computations at neural circuit level in multiple systems, such as visual system for vision, motor system for movement control, and limbic system for emotions, with rigor sufficient to reproduce similar intelligent behavior in machines.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have been increasingly developing for decades, however, the domain specificity and reliance of deep learning approaches on vast numbers of labeled data are obvious limitations; few views this as brain-like or human intelligence. Humans require little labeled data to learn, and the learned skills can be naturally generalized to other domains. How can human intelligence inspire the future AI algorithms is an emerging topic now?
The goal of this course is to establish some basic knowledge in neuroscience, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, as well as the interactions among them. We hope that on the one hand, success in these endeavors would ultimately enable us to understand the mechanisms of our cognition and behaviors better; on the other hand, the knowledge in cognitive science, neuroscience would help produce more human-like machines with human-level intelligence.
The course does not require a strong background in computer programming and statistics. A crucial aspect of the special topic is for students to become knowledgeable of applications of artificial intelligence.