The Center for Biological & Computational Learning is a research lab at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. CBCL was established in 1992 with support from the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

. It is based in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and is associated with the

McGovern Institute for Brain Research The McGovern Institute for Brain Research is a research institute within MIT. Its mission is to understand how the brain works and to discover new ways to prevent or treat brain disorders. The institute was founded in 2000 by Patrick McGover ...

, and the

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...

. It was founded with the belief that learning is at the very core of the problem of intelligence, both biological and artificial. Learning is thus the gateway to understanding how the human brain works and for making intelligent machines. CBCL studies the problem of learning within a multidisciplinary approach. Its main goal is to nurture serious research on the mathematics, the engineering and the neuroscience of learning. Research is focused on the problem of learning in theory, engineering applications, and

neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developme ...

. In

computational neuroscience Computational neuroscience (also known as theoretical neuroscience or mathematical neuroscience) is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematical models, computer simulations, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to u ...

, the center has developed a model of the

ventral stream The two-streams hypothesis is a model of the neural processing of vision as well as hearing. The hypothesis, given its initial characterisation in a paper by David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale in 1992, argues that humans possess two distinct vis ...

in the

visual cortex The visual cortex of the brain is the area of the cerebral cortex that processes visual information. It is located in the occipital lobe. Sensory input originating from the eyes travels through the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus and ...

which accounts for much of the physiological data, and psychophysical experiments in difficult object recognition tasks. The model performs at the level of the best computer vision systems{{Citation needed, date=April 2016.

External links

The Center for Biological and Computational Learning (CBCL)
*BBC:
Visions of the Future
- February 29, 2008 - This is part of the excellent BBC series entitled "visions of the future". This short clip (3min) here shows work performed at CBCL (MIT) about a computational neuroscience model of the ventral stream of the visual cortex. The story here focuses on recent work by Serre, Oliva and Poggio on comparing the performance of the model to human observers during a rapid object categorization task. *THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL oronto, Canadaby Jennifer Scott (June 17, 2002): Vide
Science, Lies & Videotape
- Tony Ezzat and Tomaso Poggio. *NBC TODAY SHOW with Katie Couric (May 20, 2002): Video:
(100 kbit/s)(300 kbit/s)
- Tony Ezzat and Tomaso Poggio. Neuroscience research centers in the United States Massachusetts Institute of Technology research institutes Research institutes in Massachusetts

See also

External links