Conference: NeuroAI and Beyond

The purpose of this workshop is to support a 2-day, in-depth discussion of recent breakthroughs in AI and neuroscience, and their potential to catalyze new research directions likely to have significant downstream impacts on society. These discussions will center around five selected topics: Embodied Cognition and Computation, Language and Communication, Robotics, Learning in Humans and Machines, and Neuromorphic Cognitive Engineering. The speed with which advances in AI and neuroscience is occurring is outrunning our ability to respond or plan future directions; this workshop engages twenty-five leaders in neuroscience, language, robotics, learning, neuromorphic engineering, computer science, and AI in intense discussions to examine new developments in AI and neuroscience that are likely to impact future advances in brain-inspired AI development, as well as how AI and related approaches could challenge and provide new insights into our current thinking of how the brain works. Unlike most workshops, which are a series of talks followed by a few questions, the participants collaborate in pre-workshop activities to generate a set of open questions to facilitate deep discussions at the workshop towards the development of synergistic collaboration across the diverse disciplines to gain greater insights into brain function, and to provide potential solutions for overcoming challenges that stand in the way of building advanced AI systems with capabilities of biological systems. In addition to thought leaders at different stages of their careers, 10 advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows invited to the workshop share their hands-on and modern understanding of existing AI tools, and discuss their needs for training/career development, particularly in areas that are currently unmet. These students and postdoctoral fellows will also serve as rapporteurs to help prepare a workshop report that provides a synthesis of workshop discussions across the many disciplines represented, and that will be shared more broadly beyond the workshop itself. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.