Mother Nature's Algorithms
Photo by Carl Socolow '77.
Associate Professor of Computer Science Grant Braught shows how nature inspires the future of tech
by Tony Moore
If you’ve ever wondered about topics such as artificial neural nets (any Star Trek fans out there?), swarm behavior or biologically inspired artificial intelligence, there was a lot to love about the last Rush Hour talk, presented by Associate Professor of Computer Science Grant Braught.
Rush Hour is a monthly series through which the community gets exposure to interdisciplinary topics through the eyes of (chiefly) Dickinson’s science faculty. In his hour-long talk, Braught discussed how computational algorithms inspired by brains, evolution and insect and bird swarms help computer scientists solve challenging problems.
For Braught’s talk, rat-brain neural pathways led off, representing a good model for creating artificial neural networks.
“So what makes these a reasonable choice for a biologically inspired computing algorithm?” he asked. “It’s that they turn out to be really good at learning things and generalizing from what they learn. Instead of programming our computer to do exactly what we want, we program it to behave like a neural network, and then we teach it to do what we want it to do, rather than trying to figure out how to write the code.”
Over the course of the hour, Braught went on to delve into the influence evolution and animal behavior has had on the development of algorithms and how neural networks’ learning capabilities can walk through the process of identifying anything from cancerous lesions to faces in a crowd, all while using algorithms to get better and better at the tasks at hand (they now know if you’re happy or sad in a picture, for instance).
Next up for Rush Hour is Dr. Barbara Slusher '86, P'16, associate professor of neurology and the director of the Brain Science Institute Neuro Translational Drug Discovery Program at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She’ll give her talk, “Drug Discovery Goes BACK to School: Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery Program,” at noon, Tuesday, March 8, in the Stafford Auditorium.
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Published March 7, 2016