Engineering x Intelligence

By Grant Currin

Computer scientists have taken inspiration from the brain since the 1940s. Neuroscientists have used computational methods to interpret experimental data for nearly that long. Today, both fields are regularly making breakthrough discoveries and advancements.

Columbia Engineering is now leading a National Science Foundation-funded research institute that enables computer scientists, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists to search for answers to a vital question: What principles underlie both natural intelligence and artificial intelligence? Along the way, researchers at the institute, called ARNI (short for artificial and natural intelligence), hope to develop new paradigms for interdisciplinary research connecting the fields.

“Humans are constantly looking at the environment around them and trying to guess what’s about to happen,” says Richard Zemel, director of ARNI and the Trianthe Dakolias Professor of Engineering and Applied Science in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia Engineering.

“We’re faced with prediction problems all the time— either explicitly or implicitly— as we operate in the world,” he says. “Presumably, that’s what our brains are tuned to do.”

At ARNI, every research project includes a PI whose primary specialty is natural intelligence and another who focuses on artificial intelligence. The goal is to make discoveries that accelerate progress in both disciplines, with an eye to advancing useful knowledge and technologies. For ARNI’s many engineers, thinking of the brain as a prediction machine clarifies the search for common principles of intelligence as an engineering problem.

“We’re trying to build a system that can predict what’s going to happen next, even in novel or very challenging situations,” Zemel says.