Talks and presentations

Concepts and Categories: a computational perspective on constructivism

December 11, 2018

Research talk, Psychologists, Engineers, and Neuroscientists seminar, Northeastern University, Boston MA, USA

I discuss how the problem of concept learning, now at the heart of machine learning, originated in psychology, and the relationship of machine learning and computational cognitive science approaches to category construction to constructivism about emotion categories in present psychology.

Neuroscience, Sloppiness, and Ground Truth

April 12, 2018

Paper presentation, Psychologists, Engineers, and Neuroscientists seminar, Northeastern University, Boston MA, USA

I discuss the relationships between different levels of explanation in neuroscience, and in the philosophy of science. I focus on the paper “Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?”, with reference to the concept of sloppiness and how it relates to reductionism.