(Learning) Visual Representations

Visual stimuli elicit action potentials in the retina, that propagate to the brain, where further action potentials are elicited. What is the nature of this visual representation? In other words, what is the correspondence between patterns of action potentials in the brain, and the stimuli that caused them? Moreover, how are these representations learned through experience? Finally (how) can we "upload" the brain's visual representations into computers, to make better artificial intelligence systems? These are the central themes of my research program, and my talk will discuss our recent progress on each of these topics.