UCL NeuroAI Talk Series | Professor Malcolm MacIver

About this event

NeuroAI is a series of themed talks organised by the UCL NeuroAI community. This month's speaker is Professor Malcolm MacIver (Northwestern University)

Title abstract- Does terrestriality advantage planning in vertebrates? 

The water-to-land transition is notable for increasing the volume of visually interrogated space by a million-fold, and for two of the more prominent groups of vertebrates manifesting a 10-fold increase in relative brain size over aquatic ectotherms. One of the capacities found in some large-brained terrestrial animals is planning. Why did this evolve? While prey behavior is often thought about as exemplifying fighting, freezing, or fleeing, perhaps predator-prey dynamics provides a more complex domain for some animals than previously understood. To investigate the possible selective benefit of planning in prey behavior, we used a planning algorithm from AI researchers (Partially Observable Monte-Carlo Planning, Silver and Veness) in prey evading reactive predators. We found that planning has a large advantage in savanna-like environments, but is about evenly matched with simpler cached strategies (habit-based action plans, “reactive/innate” strategies) otherwise, including in aquatic environments.  Encouraged by these results we report some preliminary findings from mammalian prey evading an autonomous “predator” robot in a complex space to reach their water reward. Our new planning algorithm TLPPO can operate in real-time in complex spaces; we compare behavior of AI-powered prey working in the same space against physical robots to live mouse behavior versus those same robots.

All other upcoming talks can be found here.