Biography

Jochen Triesch received his Diploma and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of Bochum, Germany, in 1994 and 1999, respectively. After two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Computer Science Department of the University of Rochester, NY, USA, he joined the faculty of the Cognitive Science Department of UC San Diego, USA, as an Assistant Professor. In 2005 he became a Fellow of the newly founded Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS), in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Since 2007 he is the Johanna Quandt Research Professor for Theoretical Life Sciences at FIAS and also holds professorships at the Department of Physics and the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His research interests span Computational Neuroscience, Cognitive Development, and Developmental Robotics.

Abstract

Intrinsic Motivations in Visual Perception

Human infants learn to perceive the world in a largely autonomous learning process, which does not require millions of carefully labeled training images. Instead, they start to look around and build impressively powerful models of the visual world around them. How does this learning process work? What motivates and guides infants’ exploration of their visual environment? I will describe recent progress in modeling key aspects of this development in the active efficient coding framework, a recent extension of classic efficient coding theories to active perception. In active efficient coding, visual representations and oculomotor behavior are learned concurrently and in a synergistic fashion to optimize the information coding of the visual system. On the one hand, these models allow robots to autonomously acquire and self-calibrate, e.g., active binocular vision or active motion vision. On the other hand, I will show how they can be used to better understand the origins and mechanisms of developmental disorders of the visual system in human infants.