Brains@Bay Meetup - Lateral Connections in the Neocortex (June 3, 2020)
Channel: Numenta
Date: 04/06/2020

To learn more about Brains@Bay, visit our Meetup page https://www.meetup.com/BraIns-Bay

Brains@Bay Meetups focus on how neuroscience can inspire us to create improved artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. In this special edition we focus on the function of lateral connections (connections between neurons within a level). Long-range lateral connections are ubiquitous in the neocortex and cannot be explained by pure feedforward models. In this meetup, researchers from the Allen Institute for Brain Science discuss their recently published paper on modeling these connections.

The speakers are Stefan Mihalas, Ramakrishnan Iyer, and Brian Hu. The title of their talk is “Lateral Connections can Perform Contextual Integration in Cortical and Convolutional Neural Networks." They present a network model of cortical computation in which the lateral connections from surrounding neurons enable each neuron to integrate contextual information from features in the surround. They show that adding these connections to deep convolutional networks in an unsupervised manner makes them more robust to noise in the input image and leads to better classification accuracy under noise.
 
Link to paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2020.00031

Link to meetup: https://www.meetup.com/BraIns-Bay/events/270695139/