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Scaling Intelligence the Human Way

Joshua Tenenbaum, PhD
Professor
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Joshua Tenenbaum is Professor of Computational Cognitive Science in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a principal investigator at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and a thrust leader in the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM). His research centers on perception, learning and common-sense reasoning in humans and machines, with the twin goals of better understanding human intelligence in computational terms and building more humanlike intelligence in machines. The machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms developed by his group are currently used by hundreds of other science and engineering groups around the world.

Tenenbaum received his PhD from MIT in 1999 and was an Assistant Professor at Stanford University from 1999 to 2002 before returning to MIT. His papers have received awards at the Cognitive Science (CogSci), Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) and Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) conferences, the International Conference on Learning and Development (ICDL) and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). He has given invited keynote talks at all of the major machine learning and artificial conferences, as well as the main meetings of the Cognitive Science Society, the Cognitive Development Society, the Society for Mathematical Psychology and held distinguished lectureships at Stanford University, the University of Amsterdam, McGill University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, San Diego and the University of Arizona. He is the recipient of the Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association and the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, and is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and the Cognitive Science Society.

Tenenbaum received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 for his work “combining computational models with behavioral experiments to shed light on human learning, reasoning and perception, and exploring how to bring artificial intelligence closer to the capabilities of human thinking.”