Abstract: One of the grand scientific challenges of this century is to generate and understand artificial systems with the intelligence, adaptivity, robustness, and flexibility of living organisms. Living organisms have evolved neural systems that allow them to adapt to new environments, to learn new tasks, and to be robust yet flexible to a wide range of perturbations to their daily function. Despite great advances in AI to date, living organisms continue to be the most intelligent systems that we know of. Accordingly, solving intelligence will benefit from understanding it first in organisms and from developing methods inspired by the principles revealed in that understanding. In this talk, I will discuss the two complementary directions of my research on the development and analysis of intelligent systems capable of adaptive behavior. The first direction involves the generation of artificial systems that target a specific living organism, their nervous system, musculature and body, and their rich behavioral repertoire. The second direction involves a theoretically driven approach, focused on improving the neural architectures that we employ in our artificial systems, the learning techniques, and the nature of the tasks that we ask them to solve. I will discuss examples from my current work, as well the directions for future work.

Short Bio: Dr. Izquierdo Torres earned his bachelor’s degree from Universidad Simon Bolivar in 2002, and his Ph.D. from the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex. In 2015, he joined the faculty of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University Bloomington. Dr. Izquierdo Torres has received multiple awards, including the prestigious NSF CAREER award. Dr. Izquierdo Torres’ research interest is to develop biologically-inspired artificial intelligence, with a focus on dynamical neural networks, evolutionary computation, and lifetime learning with two complementary research goals: to better understand intelligence in living organisms; and to develop intelligent artificial systems with the robustness, flexibility, and adaptivitiy of living organisms