Project Overview

The CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program brings together 41 researchers to examine what consciousness is and how it comes about. The program is part of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, which was founded in 1982 to bring together researchers from across disciplines and borders to address important questions that affect humanity. Fellows in CIFAR programs come together regularly to collaborate in interdisciplinary groups which give rise to new insights. The program is co-directed by Yoshua Bengio of the Universite de Montreal and Yann LeCun of New York University. The program is helping to revolutionize the field of artificial intelligence and create computers that can think more like people ­– that can recognize faces, understand what is happening in a picture or video, and comprehend the meaning of language.

Research by members of the program has helped usher in a new generation of powerful AI, and members work closely with top technology firms including Google, Facebook and Microsoft. In one recent advance, Senior Fellow Max Welling of the University of Amsterdam and colleagues applied a deep learning technique called scattering networks to the analysis of Alzheimer’s disease from brain MRI data. The study showed that in a sem-supervised learning setting, it is possible to predict with 83 per cent certainty whether a patient diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment will develop Alzheimer’s disease. In another result, Co-Director Bengio made progress in showing how back-propagation – an error correction method used to train deep learning neural networks – could be linked to learning in the brain. His work uncovered new theorems and simulation results that bring us closer to a plausible explanation of how the brain could learn in a similar to way to backpropagation.

Principal Investigator

Yoshua Bengio , Université de Montréal

Team Members

Yann Lecun, Facebook AI Research

Francis Bach, Inria

Aaron Courville, Université de Montréal

Nando de Freitas, University of Oxford

James DiCarlo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

David Fleet, University of Toronto

Brendan Frey, University of Toronto

Surya Ganguli, Stanford University

Zaid Harchaoui, Inria

Aapo Hyvarinen, University of Helsinki

Hugo Larochelle, Université de Sherbrooke

Honglak Lee, University of Michigan

Christopher Manning, Stanford University

Roland Memisevic, Université de Montréal

Andrew Ng, Stanford University

Bruno Olshausen, University of California, Berkeley

Ruslan Salakhutdinov, University of Toronto

Mark Schmidt, University of British Columbia

Eero Simoncelli, New York University

Josef Sivic, Inria

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI

Richard Sutton, University of Alberta

Antonio Torralba, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Pascal Vincent, Université de Montréal

Yair Weiss, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Max Welling, University of Amsterdam

Christopher Williams, The University of Edinburgh

Richard Zemel, University of Toronto

Partners and Donors

CIFAR