Karl Friston - On the nature of things

We are honored to welcome Dr. Karl Friston to this month's Lounge to discuss, among other things, his work on the free energy principle.

His presentation offers an informal review of self-organization as seen through the lens of the free energy principle. It addresses the question "what is a state?" And answers this question through appeal to a recursive definition of the state of things at successive scales. Mathematically, this is expressed via the renormalization group. The implicit scale-invariance is taken as a foundational structure for the nature of things. Dr. Friston will unpack this perspective using a couple of instances in which it has been applied theoretically in the context of theoretical biology and active inference.

Key words: active inference ∙ autopoiesis ∙ cognitive ∙ dynamics ∙ free energy ∙ self-organization.

Bio
Karl J. Friston, MBBS, MA, MRCPsych, MAE, FMedSci, FRBS, FRS
Professor: Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London
Honorary Consultant: The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery

Karl Friston is a theoretical neuroscientist and authority on brain imaging. He invented statistical parametric mapping (SPM), voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and dynamic causal modelling (DCM). These contributions were motivated by schizophrenia research and theoretical studies of value-learning, formulated as the dysconnection hypothesis of schizophrenia. Mathematical contributions include variational Laplacian procedures and generalised filtering for hierarchical Bayesian model inversion. Friston currently works on models of functional integration in the human brain and the principles that underlie neuronal interactions. His main contribution to theoretical neurobiology is a free-energy principle for action and perception (active inference). Friston received the first Young Investigators Award in Human Brain Mapping (1996) and was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (1999). In 2000 he was President of the international Organization of Human Brain Mapping. In 2003 he was awarded the Minerva Golden Brain Award and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006. In 2008 he received a Medal, College de France and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York in 2011. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2012, received the Weldon Memorial prize and Medal in 2013 for contributions to mathematical biology and was elected as a member of EMBO (excellence in the life sciences) in 2014 and the Academia Europaea in (2015). He was the 2016 recipient of the Charles Branch Award for unparalleled breakthroughs in Brain Research and the Glass Brain Award, a lifetime achievement award in the field of human brain mapping. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of York, Zurich and Radboud University.

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This event will be recorded. The event link will be published on meetup.com 1 hour prior to the event.

Please note the time slot- this event starts one hour later than our usual time. (1:00 pm to 3:00 pm).