CS4 future talk: Dr Daniel Polani

On Wednesday 7th November, Dr Daniel Polani from the University of Hertfordshire will give the CS4 talk “Informational Principles in the Perception-Action Loop”

Building 53 Room 4025, Highfield Campus, 4-5pm. Refreshments served after the talk.

Abstract:

“Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (1956) and, in last years, especially its later rediscovery and extension by Touchette and Lloyd (2000, 2004) have indicated that Shannon information acts as fundamental “currency” constraining the potential organisation and “administration” of cognitive tasks. In particular, there is increasing evidence that decision processes in biological organisms in fact exploit the limits implied by aforementioned work, and can therefore be subject to analysis with respect to information-theoretical optimality principles.

Under this hypothesis, many aspects of biologically plausible cognitive processing can be treated informationally, requiring only high-level constraints without having to specify detailed mechanisms. This gives rise to novel tools not only for high-level analysis of biological cognitive systems, but also for purposes of prediction and
construction of biologically plausible artificial cognitive models.

The talk will give an introduction into the question and methodology and demonstrate its operation with a number of examples.”