Alyson Fletcher, assistant professor of statistics at UCLA, and eight colleagues have launched a new annual scientific conference designed to bring researchers in artificial intelligence, cognitive science and computational neuroscience together to discuss new insights and challenges in understanding how the human brain works.
The first meeting of Cognitive Computational Neuroscience will be held Sept. 6–8 at Columbia University in New York City.
The organizers hope this gathering of researchers from multiple disciplines will work together in advancing a new area at their nexus: Creating comprehensive computational models of the brain that show how the brain processes information and explain complex intelligent behavior.
“Experimental, statistical, and computational methods have been advancing at breathtaking paces, but no one discipline is likely to ultimately succeed by building only on its own approaches,” said Fletcher, who also holds UCLA faculty appointments in computer science, electrical engineering and mathematics. “Computation and neuroscience have always inspired each other, but historically there has not been much direct interaction. We think it is the right time to attempt a much more thorough integration of the ideas of various communities.”
Co-founders of the conference include Fletcher and colleagues at Cambridge University; Columbia University; the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; the University of Pennsylvania; Stanford University; the Medical University of South Carolina; and the University of Tübingen, in Germany.
Sponsors of CCN include the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, DeepMind, Microsoft, the Kavli Foundation, and Google.
Registration and information about the conference can be found at ccneuro.org.
