People / Faculty
Tomaso Poggio, Ph.D.
Eugene McDermott Professor in the Brain Sciences and Human Behavior
Director of the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Building:46-5177
Lab: The Center for Biological & Computational Learning
Email: tp@ai.mit.edu
Computational Neuroscience
The Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT was founded with the belief that learning is at the core of the problem of intelligence, both biological and artificial. Since learning is thus assumed to be the gateway to understanding how the human brain works and for making intelligent machines, CBCL mission is to study the problem of learning within a multidisciplinary approach.
Research in the Center for Biological and Computational Learning is focused on the problem of learning in three domains a) theory; b) engineering applications; c) neuroscience.
At the level of mathematical theory, we collaborate with S. Smale (Hong Kong) and P. Niyogi (U. Chicago). In engineering applications we are working with L. Itti (USC) and C. Koch (Caltech).
In computational neuroscience, the lab is working on models of the primate visual cortex to account for physiological and psychophysical data and to explain image understanding and object recognition abilities of humans and primates. We collaborate closely with physiological and psychophysical labs, including Desimone's (MIT), Miller's (MIT), Logothetis' (MPG), Serre (Brown), Koch (Caltech), Sheinberg (Brown).
In 2008, Prof. Poggio began working with Prof. Tenenbaum, and others, to launch the Intelligence Initiative at MIT, a multidisciplinary approach to understanding how human intelligence works.
Recently, Prof. Tomaso Poggio has been notified that he was awarded the Okawa Prize for 2009. This Okawa Prize is awarded in recognition of “outstanding contributions to the research, technological development and business in the information and telecommunications fields, internationally”.
Read an Interview with Professor Poggio
Watch a presentation about Professor Poggio's work
Visions of the Future - Tomaso Poggio, Thomas Serre and Aude Oliva.
* BBC -- This is part of the excellent BBC series entitled "visions of the future". This short clip here shows work performed at CBCL (MIT) about a computational neuroscience model of the ventral stream of the visual cortex. The story here focuses on recent work by Serre, Oliva and Poggio on comparing the performance of the model to human observers during a rapid object categorization task.
NIPS 2007 tutorial videos:
Visual Recognition in Primates and Machines (T. Poggio) Tutorial:
Twenty-first Annual Conference Neural Information Processing Systems:
NIPS Conference 2007, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, December 3,
2007.
"Mathematics of the Neural Response," (Smale, S., L. Rosasco, J. Bouvrie, A. Caponnetto, and T. Poggio), Foundations of Computational Mathematics, June 2009 (online) (PDF)
"An integrated model of visual attention using shape-based features," (Chikkerur, S., C. Tan, T. Serre, and T. Poggio), CBCL paper #278/CSAIL Technical Report#2009-029, CBCL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, Jun 20, 2009, <http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/45598>
"A Canonical Neural Circuit for Cortical Nonlinear Operations" (Kouh, M . and Poggio, T.) June 2008, Vol. 20, No. 6, Pages 1427-1451 Posted Online April 17, 2008. (doi:10.1162/neco.2008.02-07-466) PDF
"A Model of V4 Shape Selectivity and Invariance," (Cadieu, C., M. Kouh, A. Pasupathy, C. Connor, M. Riesenhuber, and T. Poggio) Journal of Neurophysiology, Vol. 98, 1733-1750, June, 2007. PDF
"Biologically Inspired System for Action Recognition," (Jhuang, H., T. Serre, L. Wolf and T. Poggio) In: Proceedings of the Eleventh IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 1-8, 2007. PDF
"A Feedforward Architecture Accounts for Rapid Categorization," (Serre, T., A. Oliva and T. Poggio) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Vol. 104, No. 15, 6424-6429, 2007. PDF
"Recognition with Cortex-like Mechanisms," (Serre, T., L. Wolf, S. Bileschi, M. Riesenhuber and T. Poggio) IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 29, 3, 411-426, 2007. PDF
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW by Fred Hapgood (July 11, 2006): Reverse-Engineering the Brain - At MIT, neuroscience and artificial intelligence are beginning to intersect. - Earl Miller, Jim DiCarlo and Tomaso Poggio. PDF
"Fast Readout of Object Identity from Macaque Inferior Temporal Cortex," (Hung, C.P., G. Kreiman, T. Poggio and J.J. DiCarlo). Science, Vol. 310, 863-866, 2005. PDF
"A Theory of Object Recognition: Computations and Circuits in the Feedforward Path of the Ventral Stream in Primate Visual Cortex," (Serre, T., M. Kouh, C. Cadieu, U. Knoblich, G. Kreiman and T. Poggio). CBCL Paper #259/AI Memo #2005-036, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, October, 2005. PDF
"General Conditions for Predictivity in Learning Theory," (Poggio, T., R. Rifkin, S. Mukherjee and P. Niyogi). Nature, Vol. 428, 419-422, 2004. PDF
"Generalization in Vision and Motor Control," (Poggio, T. and E. Bizzi). Nature, Vol. 431, 768-774, 2004. PDF
"The Mathematics of Learning: Dealing with Data," (Poggio, T. and S. Smale). Notices of the AMS, Vol. 50, No. 5, 537-544, May 2003. PDF
"Models of Object Recognition," (Riesenhuber, M. and T. Poggio). Nature Neuroscience, 3 Supp., 1199-1204, 2000. PDF
"A theory of how the brain might work," (T. Poggio). In Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, LV. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 899-910, 1990.
