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• Title: Brains, Minds and Machines Summer Course
• Instructor(s): Prof. Tomaso Poggio (Course Director, MIT), Prof. Gabriel Kreiman (Course Director, Harvard)

Brains, Minds and Machines Summer Course

Course Description

Some intelligent behaviors emerge from activity in brain regions specialized for particular functions, as shown in a visualization of the brain of Prof. Nancy Kanwisher created from fMRI data (top left). Researchers are converging on an understanding of the neural circuits underlying the early stages of object recognition, captured in a model proposed by Prof. Tomaso Poggio and colleagues (right). The iCub robot created by researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology is an open source platform for exploring models of intelligent systems.

This course explores the problem of intelligence—its nature, how it is produced by the brain and how it could be replicated in machines—using an approach that integrates cognitive science, which studies the mind; neuroscience, which studies the brain; and computer science and artificial intelligence, which study the computations needed to develop intelligent machines. Materials are drawn from the Brains, Minds and Machines Summer Course offered annually at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, taught by faculty affiliated with the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines headquartered at MIT. Elements of the summer course are integrated into the MIT course, 9.523 Aspects of a Computational Theory of Intelligence.