Actions, habits, and outcome value: Parallels between approach and avoidance.

Dr. Stephen Crowley, Boise State

Clare Mathes, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Baldwin Wallace University
PhD from University of Florida
https://www.bw.edu/academics/bios/mathes-clare

Dr. Cameron Buckner

University of Houston

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, you have heard about the incredible recent achievements of deep neural networks. These artificial intelligence methods seem to achieve "superhuman" performance on new domains weekly, from beating grandmasters at the ancient Chinese game of Go to driverless navigation to automated image classification to winning at video games, to name just a few. However, it has proven difficult to explain how or why deep neural networks perform so well.

In philosophy of mind, empiricists like Locke and Hume argued that complex cognition is based on information derived from sensory experience, often appealing to a faculty of abstraction. Rationalists have frequently complained, however, that they never adequately explained how this faculty of abstraction actually works, charging that abstraction is just empiricist "magic".

In this talk, I tie these two problems together, to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. I argue that the engineering tweaks that distinguish deep networks from their shallower forebears explains how they (and the brain) implement a form of hierarchical processing that I call “transformational abstraction”. Transformational abstraction iteratively converts sensory-based representations of category exemplars into more generic formats that are increasingly tolerant to “nuisance variation”, one of the main systematic challenges that cognition must overcome to reliably succeed in the natural world. I here illustrate the power of transformational abstraction through a series of examples, including classic philosophical conundrums from Locke and Hume as well as more contemporary applications like Go strategy and abstract arts."

Devon L. Graham, Ph.D.
Florida State University College of Medicine
Department of Biomedical Sciences

Mental health disorders such as addiction, depression, and anxiety disorders have become an increasingly larger burden on society, both from a general health standpoint as well as an economic perspective. To combat this growing epidemic, newer, more effective pharmacotherapies are necessary. One option to do so it to look at alternative targets beyond the usual neurotransmitter suspects. Our research focuses on the gut peptide receptor called the glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP-1R). Drugs targeting GLP-1R have shown great promise in treating type II diabetes and managing obesity. However, we and others have shown that brain GLP-1R has potential to treat neuropsychiatric conditions as well. Our data demonstrate the potential to use drugs that have already been approved for clinical use for other disorders to also be beneficial for use in mental health disorders.

Featuring Thomas Polger, Professor of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati

Featuring Dale Edwards, UE Professor of Biology

Luciano Floridi is professor of philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire – where he holds the Research Chair in Philosophy of Information and the UNESCO Chair of Information and Computer Ethics – and Fellow of St. Cross College, University of Oxford. He is the founder and director of the IEG, the Oxford University Information Ethics Research Group.

Special Event for the Inauguration of UE's New President, Dr. Tom Kazee.