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Have you ever wanted to find out about the links between brain research and artificial intelligence? Then this is for you. Come along to hear from researchers at the University of Sheffield who border this field of work, and have the chance to meet their robots for yourself! This venue has disabled access.
What the rat’s whiskers tells the rat’s brain
Dr Kendra Arkley
(Postdoctoral Research Associate)
Have you ever stopped to think about what your hands are doing whilst searching for your keys in a bag? Or how some animals move around their environment in the dark? This talk aims to highlight one of the many functions of our beautiful mind: to ‘make sense’ of the world around us using information gathered using our sensors (e.g. hands). I will demonstrate how specialised touch sensors (the whiskers) are used by animals such as rats to explore their environment, and discuss the whisker system as a tool for understanding electrical signals in the brain, and inspiring robot design.
What Kind of AI Have We Created?
Professor Neil Lawrence
(Professor of Machine Learning and Computational Biology)
There have been fears voiced by Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking about the direction of artificial intelligent research. They worry about the creation of a sentient AI, one that might outwit us. However, the nature of the AI we have actually created is a long way distant from this. In this talk I will try and relate our models of artificial intelligence to models that have been proposed for the way humans think. The AI that Hawking and Musk fear is not yet here, but is the AI we have actually developed more or less disturbing than the vision they project?
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