Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come a long way. It allows cars to park themselves, phones can record voice messages and a navigation program to find the fastest route. And yet, these programs still lack the flexibility, creativity and responsiveness of their creators. A team of neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), led by Professor CSHL Anthony Zador, is working to change that. They’re recruiting AI experts like Nikhil Bhattasali, a Stanford AI Lab and Google alumni, to help.
“Despite recent advances in AI, our engineers are still a long way from building machines that can interact with the world on a level that closely resembles animals,” says Bhattasali. “I believe NeuroAI will allow us to better solve these problems so that one day machines will be able to enhance the capabilities of humans in the physical world.”
Bhattasali is the first CSHL NeuroAI Scholar. Over the past year, he has worked with both Zador and Professor CSHL Tatiana Engel. He appreciates the opportunity to learn from animal models, including humans, to refine AI systems. This gave him a deeper appreciation of the difficulty of the tasks performed by the nervous system.
“I worked at CSHL for a year, and I learned a lot from Anthony and Tatiana about how neuroscientists approach scientific problems,” he said.
Bhattasali has developed an AI program that can learn by itself how to swim. The program is based on the neural circuits of roundworms C. Elegant. The worm is a good system to work with because its neural circuits are fully mapped. This demonstrates how researchers can use neuroscience to develop AI that can better reproduce the movements of living organisms. Bhattasali plans to build on the foundation of his AI worm and develop evolutionary ladders for more complex animals like rodents.
He appreciates the evolutionary beginnings that humans and animals have. They have developed complex and interconnected circuits that AI systems lack. “There are many previous structures in the nervous system that have been honed over millions of years of evolution,” explains Bhattasali. “Hopefully we can study this structure to build better AI.”
The NeuroAI Scholar program attracted Bhattasali for what he describes as its “unique” approach to combining the two fields. The program was established in 2020 and is led by Zador, Engel, and Professor CSHL Alexei Koulakov. In addition to the NeuroAI Scholar program, CSHL hosts the NeuroAI Summer Research Intern program for undergraduate and graduate students. CSHL will accept applications in the summer of 2023 starting this fall.
Source: CSHL
