Terry Sejnowski

Last updated

Terry Sejnowski
Born
Terrence Joseph Sejnowski

(1947-08-13) 13 August 1947 (age 76)
Cleveland, Ohio
Alma mater Case Western Reserve University
Princeton University
University of California, San Diego
California Institute of Technology
Harvard Medical School
Johns Hopkins University
Known for Computational Neuroscience
Independent Component Analysis
Boltzmann machine
NETtalk
Awards Gruber Neuroscience Prize (2022)
Brain Prize (2024)
Scientific career
Fields Computational Neuroscience
Artificial Intelligence
Institutions Salk Institute
Princeton University
Thesis A Stochastic Model of Nonlinearly Interacting Neurons  (1978)
Doctoral advisor John Hopfield
Notable students Peter Dayan
Zachary Mainen
P. Read Montague
Website www.salk.edu/scientist/terrence-sejnowski

Terrence Joseph Sejnowski (born 13 August 1947) is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical and computational biology. He has performed pioneering research in neural networks and computational neuroscience. [1] [2] [3] [4]

Contents

Sejnowski is also Professor of Biological Sciences and adjunct professor in the departments of neurosciences, psychology, cognitive science, computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he is co-director of the Institute for Neural Computation.

With Barbara Oakley, he co-created and taught Learning How To Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects, the world's most popular online course, [5] available on Coursera. [6]

Education and early life

Born in Cleveland in 1947, [7] Sejnowski received his B.S. in physics in 1968 from the Case Western Reserve University, M.A. in physics from Princeton University with John Archibald Wheeler, and a PhD in physics from Princeton University in 1978 with John Hopfield.

While in Princeton for his M.A. in physics, he analyzed the strength of gravitational waves from all known sources at the time, and the required sensitivity needed for detection. He noticed that all gravitational wave detectors were 1000x too insensitive to detect, and, thinking that the requisite detectors would not appear until 30 years later, decided to go into a different field. [8]

Career and research

From 1978–1979 Sejnowski was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at Princeton University with Alan Gelperin and from 1979–1981 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School with Stephen Kuffler. In 1982, he joined the faculty of the Department of Biophysics at the Johns Hopkins University, where he achieved the rank of Professor before moving to San Diego, California in 1988. He was an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1991 to 2018.

He has had a long-standing affiliation with the California Institute of Technology, as a Wiersma Visiting Professor of Neurobiology in 1987, as a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar in 1993 and as a part-time Visiting Professor 1995–1998. In 2004, he was named the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute and the director of the Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biology.

Honours and awards

Sejnowski received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984 from the National Science Foundation (NSF). He received the Wright Prize from the Harvey Mudd College for excellence in interdisciplinary research in 1996 and the Hebb Prize for his contributions to learning algorithms by the International Neural Network Society in 1999. He became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2000 for fundamental advances in the theory and practice of neural networks and for contributions to computational neuroscience. [9] In the same year, he also received their Neural Network Pioneer Award in 2002. In 2003, he was elected to the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. He is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council. [10] He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2008. [11] In 2010, he was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), [12] [13] and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011. [14] In 2017, he was elected to the National Academy of Inventors. [15] These achievements place him in a group of only three living people to have been elected to all four of the national academies. [16] In 2013, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences [17] and was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014. [18] He was awarded the 2015 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience. [19] He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich in 2017. In 2022, he was awarded the Gruber Neuroscience Prize. [20] In 2024, he was awarded The Brain Prize for pioneering work in theoretical neuroscience alongside Larry Abbott and Haim Sompolinsky. [21] That same year, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science from Princeton University. [22]

Neural networks

His research in neural networks and computational neuroscience has been pioneering. In the early 1980s, particularly following work by John Hopfield, computer simulations of neural networks became widespread. Early applications, particularly by Sejnowski and Geoffrey Hinton, demonstrated that simple neural networks could be made to learn tasks of at least some sophistication. In 1989, Sejnowski founded Neural Computation, published by the MIT Press, the leading journal in neural networks and computational neuroscience. He is also the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, a non-profit organization that oversees the annual NeurIPS Conference. This interdisciplinary meeting brings together researchers from many disciplines, including biology, physics, mathematics, and engineering.

He co-invented the Boltzmann machine [23] with Geoffrey Hinton and pioneered the application of learning algorithms to difficult problems in speech (NETtalk) [24] and vision. [25] His postdoc, Tony Bell, developed the infomax algorithm for Independent Component Analysis (ICA) [26] which has been widely adopted in machine learning, signal processing and data mining.

Research

The long-range goal of Sejnowski's research is to understand the computational resources of brains and to build linking principles from brain to behavior using computational models. This goal is being pursued with a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches at several levels of investigation ranging from the biophysical level to the systems level. Hippocampal and cortical slice preparations are being used to explore the properties of single neurons and synapses, including the precision of spike firing and the influence of neuromodulators. Biophysical models of electrical and chemical signal processing within neurons are used as an adjunct to physiological experiments. New techniques have been developed for modeling cell signaling using Monte Carlo methods (MCell). [27]

The central issues being addressed are how dendrites integrate synaptic signals in neurons, how networks of neurons generate dynamical patterns of activity, how sensory information is represented in the cerebral cortex, how memory representations are formed and consolidated during sleep, and how visuo-motor transformations are adaptively organized. His laboratory has developed new methods for analyzing the sources for electrical and magnetic signals recorded from the scalp and hemodynamic signals from functional neuroimaging by blind separation using ICA. The EEGLAB public software which was as of 2012 the most popular software for processing EEG data was originally developed in his laboratory. [28]

Symposia

He has participated and spoken at the Beyond Belief symposia in 2006 and 2007. He participated in the conference Waking Up to Sleep at the Salk Institute in February 2007 (online video available). [29]

Membership

Sejnowski was a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health for the Brain Research through Application of Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, [30] announced by President Obama on 2 April 2013. Their BRAIN 2025 report [31] was released by NIH on 5 June 2014 and has been used to prioritize NIH BRAIN Initiative projects. He was previously part of a team of engineers and neuroscientists who developed the Brain Activity Map Project, which served as the template for the BRAIN Initiative. [32]

Authorship

In 1992, Sejnowski co-authored The Computational Brain with Patricia Churchland [33] and in 2002 the book Liars, Lovers, and Heroes; What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We are with Steven R. Quartz. [34] His book, The Deep Learning Revolution, was published by the MIT Press in June 2018. His most recent book, ChatGPT and the Future of AI: The Deep Language Revolution, will published by the MIT Press in October 2024.

He has co-created (with Professor Barbara Oakley) and teaches Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects, a massive open online course offered on Coursera. The course had its first three runs in August and October 2014 and January 2015, when it attracted approximately 300,000 students. In 2015, enrollment in the course reached 1 million, [5] a total of about 2 million students as of August 2017, 3 million students as of 2021, and 4 million students as of 2024.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive neuroscience</span> Scientific field

Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and computational modeling.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salk Institute for Biological Studies</span> Scientific research institute in San Diego, US

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is a scientific research institute located in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California. The independent, non-profit institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine; among the founding consultants were Jacob Bronowski and Francis Crick. Construction of the research facilities began in spring of 1962. The Salk Institute consistently ranks among the top institutions in the US in terms of research output and quality in the life sciences. In 2004, the Times Higher Education Supplement ranked Salk as the world's top biomedicine research institute, and in 2009 it was ranked number one globally by ScienceWatch in the neuroscience and behavior areas.

Computational neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematics, computer science, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand the principles that govern the development, structure, physiology and cognitive abilities of the nervous system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patricia Churchland</span> Canadian-American analytic philosopher

Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American analytic philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has taught since 1984. She has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989. She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department, Moscow State University. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Educated at the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and Somerville College, Oxford, she taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is married to the philosopher Paul Churchland. Larissa MacFarquhar, writing for The New Yorker, observed of the philosophical couple that: "Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed, in journals and books, as one person."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Dayan</span> Researcher in computational neuroscience

Peter Dayan is a British neuroscientist and computer scientist who is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, along with Ivan De Araujo. He is co-author of Theoretical Neuroscience, an influential textbook on computational neuroscience. He is known for applying Bayesian methods from machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand neural function and is particularly recognized for relating neurotransmitter levels to prediction errors and Bayesian uncertainties. He has pioneered the field of reinforcement learning (RL) where he helped develop the Q-learning algorithm, and made contributions to unsupervised learning, including the wake-sleep algorithm for neural networks and the Helmholtz machine.

Brian R. Christie is a Professor of Medicine and Neuroscience at The University of Victoria. He helped found the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Victoria and served as its director from 2010–2017. He is a Michael Smith Senior Scholar Award winner. Christie received his PhD in 1992 from the University of Otago before doing postdoctoral work with Daniel Johnston at Baylor College of Medicine and Terrence Sejnowski at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and then became Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. Promoted to Associate Professor in 2007. Full Professor in 2013.

Pendleton Read Montague, Jr. is an American neuroscientist and popular science author. He is the director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab and Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC in Roanoke, Virginia, where he also holds the title of the inaugural Virginia Tech Carilion Vernon Mountcastle Research Professor. Montague is also a professor in the department of physics at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia and professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tomaso Poggio</span> Italian physicist and computational neuroscientist

Tomaso Armando Poggio, is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and director of both the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, a multi-institutional collaboration headquartered at the McGovern Institute since 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Bingham</span> British science communicator, writer, and public television producer and host (1948–2023)

Roger Bingham was a British science educator, author and television host based in La Jolla, California. He was co-founder and director of the Science Network (TSN), a virtual forum dedicated to science and its impact on society. Bingham was also the creator of the Beyond Belief conferences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Earl K. Miller</span>

Earl Keith Miller is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on neural mechanisms of cognitive, or executive, control. Earl K. Miller is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience with the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of SplitSage. He is a co-founder of Neuroblox.

Ralph Mitchell Siegel, a researcher who studied the neurological underpinnings of vision, was a professor of neuroscience at Rutgers University, Newark, in the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience. He died September 2, 2011, at his home following a long illness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Wolpert</span> British neuroscientist

Daniel Mark Wolpert FRS FMedSci is a British medical doctor, neuroscientist and engineer, who has made important contributions in computational biology. He was Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge from 2005, and also became the Royal Society Noreen Murray Research Professorship in Neurobiology from 2013. He is now Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia University.

Laurence Frederick Abbott is an American theoretical neuroscientist, who is currently the William Bloor Professor of Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University, where he helped create the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. He is widely regarded as one of the leaders of theoretical neuroscience, and is coauthor, along with Peter Dayan, on the first comprehensive textbook on theoretical neuroscience, which is considered to be the standard text for students and researchers entering theoretical neuroscience. He helped invent the dynamic clamp method alongside Eve Marder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Haim Sompolinsky</span>

Haim Sompolinsky, is the William N. Skirball Professor of Neuroscience at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, and a professor of physics at the Racah Institute of Physics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is also a visiting professor in the Center of Brain Science at Harvard University and the director of Harvard's Swartz Program in Theoretical Neuroscience. He is widely regarded as one of the leaders of theoretical neuroscience.

Alexandre Pouget is a full Professor at the University of Geneva in the department of basic neurosciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tatyana Sharpee</span> American computational neuroscientist

Tatyana Sharpee is an American neuroscientist. She is a Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where she spearheads a research group at the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, with the support from Edwin Hunter Chair in Neurobiology. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Physics at University of California, San Diego. She was elected a fellow of American Physical Society in 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margarita Behrens</span> Neuroscientist and biochemist

Margarita Behrens is a neuroscientist and biochemist. She is currently an associate professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where her lab studies the impact of oxidative stress on the post-natal brain through probing the biology of fast-spiking parvalbumin interneurons in models of schizophrenia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kanaka Rajan</span> Indian-American computational neuroscientist

Kanaka Rajan is a computational neuroscientist in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and founding faculty in the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University. Rajan trained in engineering, biophysics, and neuroscience, and has pioneered novel methods and models to understand how the brain processes sensory information. Her research seeks to understand how important cognitive functions — such as learning, remembering, and deciding — emerge from the cooperative activity of multi-scale neural processes, and how those processes are affected by various neuropsychiatric disease states. The resulting integrative theories about the brain bridge neurobiology and artificial intelligence.

François Guillemot,, is a French neurobiologist, currently working at the Francis Crick Institute in London. His research focuses on the behaviour of neural stem cells in embryos and adult brains.

John Reynolds is an American neuroscientist. He is a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, adjunct professor at University of California, San Diego, and member of the advisory board for the Kavli Foundation Kavli Institute for the Brain and Mind. He studies perception and vision and is known for developing a computational model of attention that scientists use as a framework for understanding how the brain performs attentional selection.

References

  1. ↑ "Terrence Sejnowski". Salk.edu. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  2. ↑ "CNL : The Computational Neurobiology Laboratory". Cnl.salk.edu. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  3. ↑ "Terrence J. Sejnowski". Biology.ucsd.edu. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  4. ↑ "Behavior and Our Brain - Mysteries of the Brain - Terry Sejnowski - Brain, Behavior, Neuroscience, Sejnowski - sciencestage.com Medicine". sciencestage.com. Archived from the original on 12 June 2010. Retrieved 17 January 2022.
  5. 1 2 Markoff, John (29 December 2015). "The Most Popular Online Course Teaches You to Learn". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 January 2016. The world's most popular online course is a general introduction to the art of learning, taught jointly by an educator and a neuroscientist.
  6. ↑ "Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects".
  7. ↑ James A. Anderson, Edward Rosenfeld eds. (2000) Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks. Chapter 14. MIT Press
  8. ↑ Brenner, Sydney; Sejnowski, Terrence (10 September 2018). In The Spirit Of Science: Lectures By Sydney Brenner On Dna, Worms And Brains. World Scientific. p. 47. ISBN   978-981-327-175-3.
  9. ↑ "IEEE Fellows 2000". IEEE Communications Society.
  10. ↑ Design Futures Council Senior Fellows "Senior Fellows :: DesignIntelligence". Archived from the original on 6 November 2007. Retrieved 6 November 2007.
  11. ↑ Institute of Medicine "NIMH · Institute of Medicine of the National Academies Announces New Members". Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  12. ↑ "Terrence Sejnowski". Nasonline.org. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  13. ↑ "72 New Members Chosen By Academy". 8.nationalacademies.org. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  14. ↑ "NAE Elects 68 Members and Nine Foreign Members". Nae.edu. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  15. ↑ "National Academy of Inventors". Academyofinventors.org. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  16. ↑ "Terrence Sejnowski, May 7, 2018". Engineering-Driven Medicine Distinguished Lecture. Stony Brook University College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Retrieved 13 June 2022.
  17. ↑ "2013 Fellows and their affiliations at the time of election" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original (PDF) on 12 May 2013. Retrieved 17 January 2022.
  18. ↑ "APS Fellowship". Aps.org. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  19. ↑ "Awards". Sfn.org. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  20. ↑ Gruber Neuroscience Prize 2022
  21. ↑ Meyer, M. (2024, March 5). Pioneering work in computational and theoretical neuroscience is awarded the world’s largest brain research prize. The Lundbeck Foundation.
  22. ↑ "Princeton awards seven honorary degrees". Princeton University. 28 May 2024. Retrieved 4 June 2024.
  23. ↑ Ackley, D. H. Hinton, G. E. Sejnowski, T. J. A Learning Algorithm for Boltzmann Machines*, Cognitive Science, 9, 147–169, 1985
  24. ↑ Sejnowski, T. J. Rosenberg, C. R. Parallel Networks That Learn to Pronounce English Text, Complex Systems, 1, 145–168, 198
  25. ↑ Lehky, S. R. Sejnowski, T. J. Network Model of Shape-from-Shading: Neural Function Arises from Both Receptive and Projective Fields, Nature, 333, 452–454, 1988
  26. ↑ Bell, A. J. Sejnowski, T. J. An Information-Maximization Approach to Blind Separation and Blind Deconvolution, Neural Computation, 7, 1129–1159, 1995
  27. ↑ Coggan, J. S. Bartol, T. M. Jr. Esquenazi, E. I. Stiles, J. R. Lamont, S. Martone, M. E. Berg, D. K. Ellisman, M. H. Sejnowski, T. J. Evidence for Ectopic Neurotransmission at a Neuronal Synapse, Science, 39, 446–451, 2005
  28. ↑ Makeig, S., Westerfield, M., Jung, T.-P., Enghoff, S., Townsend, J., Courchesne, E., Sejnowski, T. J. Dynamic brain sources of visual evoked responses. Science, 295: 690–694(2002)
  29. ↑ Bingham, Roger; Terrence Sejnowski; Jerry Siegel; Mark Eric Dyken; Charles A. Czeisler; Paul Shaw; Ralph Greenspan; Satchin Panda; Philip Low; Robert Stickgold; Sara Mednick; Allan Pack; Luis de Lecea; David Dinges; Dan Kripke; Giulio Tononi (February 2007). "Waking Up To Sleep" (Several conference videos). The Science Network. Retrieved 25 January 2008.
  30. ↑ "Advisory Committee to the Director. Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Working Group: Roster" (PDF). National Institutes of Health. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 April 2013. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
  31. ↑ "BRAIN 2025 Report – Brain Initiative". Braininitiative.nih.gov. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  32. ↑ Alivisatos, A. P., Chun, M., Church, G.M., Deisseroth, K., Donoghue, J.P., Greenspan, R.J., McEuen, P.L., Roukes, M.L., Sejnowski, T. J., Weiss, P.S., Yuste, R., The Brain Activity Map, Science, 339, 1284–1285 (2013).
  33. ↑ Churchland, P. S. and Sejnowski, T. J., The Computational Brain, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1992).
  34. ↑ HarperCollins (23 September 2003). Liars, Lovers, and Heroes. Harper Collins. ISBN   9780060001490 . Retrieved 27 August 2015.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.