Abstract: Founded in 2011 in London, Google DeepMind is a unique environment for
long-term ambitious research to flourish in. This talk will share how their
world-class interdisciplinary team has made a number of high profile
breakthroughs towards general AI by combining the best techniques from deep
learning, reinforcement learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful
general-purpose learning algorithms. Bio: Demis Hassabis is a neuroscientist and leading expert on the neural basis
of memory and imagination. He is the Founder/CEO of DeepMind Technologies
which was recently acquired by Google. Demis was a former child chess
prodigy, who finished his A-levels early at 16 before going on to co-create
the multi-million selling video game Theme Park for Bullfrog Productions.
Upon graduating from Cambridge University with a Double First in Computer
Science he founded the high-profile video games company Elixir Studios,
which he grew to 60 people, producing pioneering games for Microsoft and
Vivendi Universal. After successfully selling the IP and technology rights,
Demis returned to academia to complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at
UCL, focusing on the hippocampus and amnesia. His research systematically
connecting memory with imagination for the first time was listed in the top
ten scientific breakthroughs of 2007 by the journal Science. Subsequently
he was a visiting scientist jointly at MIT and Harvard, before securing a
Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship as a Research Fellow at the Gatsby
Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL. |