Biological and Artificial Visual Systems: How Humans and Machines Represent the Visual World

Harvard FAS

Someday, perhaps very soon, artificial intelligence will enable machines to perceive the world around us better than humans do. Whether AI systems will do so by emulating human perception, or by becoming supra-human and circumventing biological constraints entirely, is yet unknown. In this course, we will survey research on human and machine perception, with an emphasis on vision: How do humans and machines represent the visual world? What does human vision do that artificial neural networks…