voula@utcsri.UUCP (Voula Vanneli) (03/19/85)
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE (_G_B = _G_a_l_b_r_a_i_t_h _B_u_i_l_d_i_n_g, _3_5 _S_t. _G_e_o_r_g_e) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE/THEORETICAL ASPECTS/SYSTEMS SEMINAR Thursday, March 28, 11 am, GB 220 Professor Jerry Feldman Dept. of Computer Science, University of Rochester "Massive Parallelism in Nature and in Computer Science" Abstract Human brains made of millisecond components (neurons) can carry out complex perceptual tasks in less than a second i.e. in about a hundred sequential time steps. This compu- tational constraint, among others, suggests that the algo- rithms employed by nature are quite different from those of conventional AI. Several groups have been exploring the direct use of "connectionist" computational models and have obtained some promising results. The talk will describe a model of massively parallel computation, its application to problems of vision and language, and some of the issues it raises for theoretical and systems work on parallel computa- tion.