The Computer Science Department’s Class of 1960 Scholars Lecture Series
Thursday, September 18 at 8:00 pm in Wege Auditorium (TCL 123)
Neural Representations of Language Meaning
How does the human brain use neural activity to create and represent meanings of words, sentences and stories? One way to study this question is to give peopletext to read, while scanning their brain. We have been doing such experiments with fMRI (1 mm spatial resolution) and MEG (1 msec time resolution) brain imaging. As a result, we have learned answers to questions such as “Are the neural encodings of word meaning the same in your brain and mine?”, “Are neural encodings of word meaning built out of recognizable subcomponents, or are they randomly different for each word?,” and “What sequence of neurally encoded information flows through the brain during the half-second in which the brain comprehends a word?” This talk will summarize some of what we have learned, and newer questions we are currently working on.
Tom M. Mitchell is the E. Fredkin University Professor and head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, and a member of CMU’s Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. His research interests lie in cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Mitchell is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Fellow and Past President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Mitchell’s home page is www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom