I² Seed Grant Awards

Oct 08, 2010

Thanks to the help and generosity of Dean Marc Kastner, and the other MIT deans, I² is now glad to announce the support of eleven I² Seed Projects. Several worthwhile projects could not be funded at this time but hopefully they will be funded at a later date.

During the Spring semester the Intelligence Initiative requested proposals from MIT faculty members for collaborative seed projects. 

The following projects will receive funding for shared postdoctoral fellow(s):

Bridging robotics and neuroscience

[Funding for a total of 2 postdocs to be shared among projects]:

  • "Life-long Mapping"; Team Leaders: Matt Wilson (BCS) and John Leonard (MechE, CSAIL), Group Members: Hordur Johannsson (EECS)
  • "Symbolic Ideation in Motor Planning"; Team leaders: Seth Teller (EECS, CSAIL) and Matt Wilson (BCS); Group Members: (TBD)
  • "Vision for the Birds"; Team Leaders: Russ Tedrake (EECS) and Bill Freeman (EECS); Group Members: Michael Fee (BCS) and Andrew Biewener (Harvard U., Bio)
  • "High-Throughput In Vivo Causal Assessment of Neural Circuits of Intelligence"; Team leader: Ed Boyden (MediaLab, BCS, BioEng); Group Members: Clifton Fonstad (EECS) and Tomaso Poggio (BCS, CSAIL)

Social and collective intelligence

[Funding for a total of 2 postdocs to be shared among projects]:

  • " Agent-Based Models of Social Intelligence Based on Behavioral Heuristics Informed by Cognitive Neurosciences"; Team leader: Andrew Lo ; Group Members: Tomaso Poggio (BCS, CSAIL), Joshua Tenenbaum (BCS) and Rebecca Saxe (BCS)
  • " When are groups more intelligent than individuals?"; Team leader: Asu Ozdaglar (EECS, LIDS); Group Member: Sandy Pentland (MAS)
  • " Combining human and machine predictions using 'boosting' algorithms"; Team leaders: Tom Malone (Sloan, CCI), Cynthia Rudin (Sloan) and Patrick Winston (EECS, CSAIL); Group Member: Haym Hirsh (Rutgers U., CS/ visiting Sloan - CCI)
  • "Application of Bayesian truth serum to forecasting, and collaborative discussion"; Team Leader: Drazen Prelec (Sloan, Econ, BCS); Team Member: H. Sebastian Seung (BCS, Physics)

Language, perception and intelligence; and the development of intelligence in minds, brains and machines

[Funding for a total of 1.5 postdocs to be shared among projects]:

  • "Language research: Connecting Computer Science, Psychology and Linguistics"; Team leader: Ted Gibson; Group members: Regina Barzilay (CSAIL), Irene Heim (LingPhil) and Tim O'Donnell (BCS)
  • "Biological Foundations of Language"; Team Leader: Bob Berwick (EECS/BCS); Group Members: Noam Chomsky (LingPhil), Morris Halle (LingPhil) and Whitman Richards (BCS)
  • "Learning Causal Action Selection via Motor Babble and Observation"; Team Leaders: Seth Teller (EECS, CSAIL), Tommi Jaakkola (EECS, CSAIL) and Josh Tenenbaum (BCS)

The following proposals will be supported at the level of a workshop and/or working groups to help develop the projects further:

  • "The Turing Test for Vision"; Team Leader: Patrick Winston; Group Members: Tomaso Poggio (BCS, CSAIL) and Shimon Ullman (Weizmann Inst, BCS)
  • "Hierarchical visual scene understanding"; Team Leader: Aude Oliva (BCS); Group Member: Antonio Torralba (EECS, CSAIL)
  • "The 3-6-12 Project: Reverse Engineering the Infant Mind"; Team leader: Josh Tenenbaum (BCS); Group Members: Tomaso Poggio (BCS), Rebecca Saxe (BCS), Laura Schulz (BCS), Shimon Ullman (Weizmann Inst, BCS), Leslie Kaelbling (EECS), Patrick Winston (EECS, CSAIL), Seth Teller (EECS, CSAIL), and Deb Roy (MAS); Outside Consulting Members: Liz Spelke (Harvard U., Psych), Susan Carey (Harvard U., Psych.) and Noah Goodman (Stanford U., Psych)

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