Peter Dayan is director at the

Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics The Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics is located in Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is one of 80 institutes in the Max Planck Society (Max Planck Gesellschaft). The institute is studying signal and information processin ...

Tübingen Tübingen (, , Swabian: ''Dibenga'') is a traditional university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer rivers. about one in three ...

, Germany. He is co-author of ''Theoretical Neuroscience'', an influential textbook on

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 ...

. He is known for applying

Bayesian method Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. Bayesian inference is an important technique in statistics, and e ...

s from

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

to understand neural function and is particularly recognized for relating neurotransmitter levels to prediction errors and Bayesian uncertainties. He has pioneered the field of

reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize the notion of cumulative reward. Reinforcement learning is one of three basic machine ...

(RL) where he helped develop the

Q-learning ''Q''-learning is a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to learn the value of an action in a particular state. It does not require a model of the environment (hence "model-free"), and it can handle problems with stochastic transitions an ...

algorithm, and made contributions to

unsupervised learning Unsupervised learning is a type of algorithm that learns patterns from untagged data. The hope is that through mimicry, which is an important mode of learning in people, the machine is forced to build a concise representation of its world and t ...

, including the wake-sleep algorithm for neural networks and the

Helmholtz machine Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (31 August 1821 – 8 September 1894) was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields, particularly hydrodynamic stability. The Helmholtz Associatio ...

Education

Dayan studied mathematics at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

and then continued for a PhD in

at the

University of Edinburgh School of Informatics The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former Department of Artificial Intell ...

on statistical learning supervised by David Willshaw and David Wallace, focusing on associative

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered ...

and

Career and research

After his PhD, Dayan held

postdoctoral research A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to pu ...

positions with

Terry Sejnowski Terrence Joseph Sejnowski (born 13 August 1947) is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical ...

at the

Salk Institute The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is a scientific research institute located in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California, U.S. The independent, non-profit institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vacci ...

and

Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on a ...

at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 ...

. He then took up an assistant professor position 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 ...

(MIT), and moved to the

Gatsby Charitable Foundation The Gatsby Charitable Foundation is an endowed grant-making trust, based in London, founded by David Sainsbury in 1967. The organisation is one of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, set up to provide funding for charitable causes. Although t ...

computational neuroscience unit at

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

(UCL) in 1998, becoming professor and director in 2002. In September 2018, the Max Planck Society announced his appointment as a director at the

Awards and honours

Dayan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: He was awarded the Rumelhart Prize in 2012 and

The Brain Prize The Brain Prize, formerly known as The Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize, is an international scientific award honouring "one or more scientists who have distinguished themselves by an outstanding contribution to neuroscience and who are ...

in 2017.

References

Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Living people Jewish scientists Rumelhart Prize laureates Fellows of the Royal Society 1965 births Alumni of the University of Cambridge Max Planck Institute directors Academics of University College London {{neuroscientist-stub

Education

Career and research

Awards and honours

See also

References