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Last active December 24, 2018 13:11
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Prof. Michael Levin talk about "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System"
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Overview

At NeurIPS 2018, Prof. Michael Levin presented, "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (video recording).

Summary by Guillermo Valle:

Bodies have bioelectrical patterns that store information "memories" separately from genomic, anatomical states. These bioelectrical patterns play a huge role in developmental processes, so that being able to control them is basically like a holy grail of regenerative medicine. It also offers interesting new insights for Artificial Intelligence and cognition/neuroscience.

Opinion

Prof. Levin talks about how long term low energy electrical networks between all cells in living organisms shape how the organism grows.

We think what he talks about will be the future of medicine as it allows for an amazing degree of high level control over how animals grow.

Professor Levin and His Research

His research at Levin Lab investigate information storage and processing in biological systems.

We use techniques of artificial intelligence and neuroscience to find out what information biologitcal tissues have, and how it is stored, processed, and communicated. Our focus on algorithmic (constructivist) computer models of patterning is an important component of linking genetic networks to complex 3-dimensional shape and its regulation in vivo.

Biology is Fascinating

I am still fascinated by the world of biology. Mid of 2018, I started learning (for fun) functional genomics, microbiology and RNA regulation and this opened-up my mind to new possibilities and ideas. With Prof. Levin presentation, this just blow my mind!

The Future

The Future (video) according to Prof. Levin:

A highly-robust Machine Learning technology, based on non-neural architectures.

A tweet by Andrej Karpathy says:

Incredible NeurIPS talk from @drmichaellevin on "Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" so much focus on the software of neural networks when cellular networks (more generally) feature more ancient and highly sophisticated / robust dynamics.

PS: I first learned about Andrej Karpathy in 2016 from his amazing Stanford University CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks course.

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