About the Workshop

Broad Aims

The workshop is a 3-week project based meeting organized around specific topic areas  to bring the organizing principles of neural cognition into machine intelligence, and to use lessons and technology from machine intelligence to understand how brains work. 

Approach

The workshop is held annually for 3 weeks generally under this schedule .  Participants are selected by the topic areas. The multidisciplinary aims encourage collaboration and information flow among participants. The workshop focuses on a mixture of tutorials, lectures on cutting edge research, and hands-on project work (see videos of some projects here) on topics at the border of neuroscience and AI. The project teams are organized into themed topic areas to encourage collaboration between diverse experts. Like the Cold Spring Harbor and Woods Hole summer labs and the Capo Caccia Neuromorphic Workshop, the Telluride workshop brings together major scientists and technologists with young researchers for an extended period  to work together on concrete projects. 

Workshop Location: In Telluride, Colorado, at the Telluride Elementary School.

Telluride

The workshop is hosted by the scenic mountain valley town of Telluride, at an elevation of 9000' (2,667 m) . We work in one wing of a public schoolhouse and enjoy recreation time among the famous Rocky Mountains. Workshop participants are housed in shared condominiums spread over Telluride. The town is a lively and popular summer destination for its renowned music festivals and excellent outdoor sports; workshop participants organize hiking, overnight backpacking, fishing, volleyball, tennis, and mountain biking groups. A highlight of the workshop is our participation in the July 4th Independence Day town parade, at which the Neuromorphs have won many awards. There is an excellent town library and town park. The Telluride Academy offers children's summer courses including kids' robotics camps . Everything in the town is in walking distance, including an excellent  Ace hardware store.  The workshop has a  staff of 3-5 people for daily operation (breakfast, IT support, logistics, BBQs, etc.).

Life at the workshop

During the 2nd week, a group of distinguished neuroscientists invited by Terry Sejnowski presents lectures on cutting-edge neuroscience

Photos from previous workshops

Motivation

During the history of the workshop, both neuroscience and artificial intelligence have exploded in terms of technological capabilities. AI systems based on deep learning draw fundamental inspiration from the organization of elements involved in biological cognition. They have revolutionized most applications of machine intelligence in recent years. The capacity for neuroscience to collect data has also expanded enormously, enabling the potential for interdisciplinary work that applies machine learning to model neural activity in novel ways. 

Machine intelligence today still burns thousands of times the power consumed by brains, leading to unsolved size, weight, and power problems in embodied systems. Technology has struggled to move past supervised learning and into the domains of natural intelligence, where animals and humans can easily learn certain skills with only a few experiences, and most computers still require millions of repetitions to learn basic sensory-motor skills in a simulated environment. 

Time lapse of one of the labs

Hear about the workshop