HDSI Distinguished Seminar – Ila Fiete

Speaker: Ila Fiete
Date & Time: Mon Dec 8th, 2:00pm
NEW LOCATION:  Jacobs Hall, Qualcomm Conference Center B, 1st Floor

Abstract: Modular and hierarchical structures are ubiquitous in the brain, and the decomposition of tasks into invariant subfactors of variation are arguably the basis for robust, efficient learning, compositional generalization, and lack of forgetting. In this talk, I will describe simple mechanisms for the emergent self-organization of structures for such computation, arising from local competition and fault-tolerance constraints. I will show how these principles are implemented in brains, leading to qualitative and topologically robust predictions about brain organization. I will discuss how these biological principles can be abstracted to drive modularity in artificial neural networks, and show how modular organization can serve as an inductive bias for world structure learning, including the discovery of vanishingly few modular solutions to modular problems in the space of all possible solutions.

Bio: Ila Fiete is a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, associate member of the McGovern Institute, and director of the K. Lisa Yang ICoN Center at MIT. Fiete earned a BS in mathematics and physics at the University of Michigan, obtaining her PhD in physics at Harvard University in 2004. She conducted her postdoctoral work at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara while she was also a visiting member of the Center for Theoretical Biophysics at the University of California, San Diego. Fiete subsequently spent two years at Caltech as a Broad Fellow in brain circuitry, then joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin before coming to MIT in 2019.