Terrence J. Sejnowski

Dr. Terrence Sejnowski received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University and was a postdoctoral fellow in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, where he was a Professor of Biophysics. He moved to La Jolla and now holds the Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and is also a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he is a director of the Institute for Neural Computation. He is also the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Foundation, which organizes an annual conference that was the incubator for deep learning and was attended by 26,000 researchers in 2020. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Inventors, one of only three living scientists elected to all four national academies.

Sejnowski pioneered learning algorithms for neural networks in the 1980s. He co-invented the Boltzmann with Geoffrey Hinton and developed Independent Component Analysis (ICA), a machine learning algorithm for blind source separation of mixed signals. His book, The Deep Learning Revolution, explores the origins of modern artificial intelligence and its convergence with discoveries in brain science. He also pioneered computational neuroscience and his book with Patricia Churchland, The Computational Brain, showed how distributed population activity in neural network models gives rise to behavior. His Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), Learning How to Learn with Barbara Oakley, is based on learning in brains and has been viewed by over 3 million learners in over 200 countries, and their new book, Uncommon Sense Teaching, is aimed at helping teachers navigate the complexities of two major learning systems in brains.