Basis: Designing a New Kind of AI Research Organization
Written in 2022, this founding document defines Basis’ vision and thesis of how to build a new kind of research organization.
People
Emily Mackevicius
Co-founder and Director, Basis Research Institute
Emily Mackevicius is a co-founder and director of Basis, where she leads the Collaborative Intelligent Systems group. She did her postdoctoral work studying memory-expert birds in the Aronov lab and the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia, and her PhD work studying how birds learn to sing in the Fee lab at MIT. Her theoretical work is strongly grounded in experimental practice, currently high-resolution behavioral recordings of groups of animals foraging in environments ranging from NYC to Arctic Alaska.
Articles
Basis essays and updates this person wrote or contributed to.
NeuroAI for AI Safety
Basis contributed to a new technical roadmap, “NeuroAI for AI Safety,” from Amaranth Foundation. The roadmap aims to make AI systems safer by understanding and implementing the brain’s approach to intelligent behavior.
Linking Cognitive Strategy, Neural Mechanism, and Movement Statistics in Group Foraging Behaviors
In a new paper, we combined cognitive neuroscience with statistical methods to model group foraging behavior. Our ongoing work aims to construct a unifying framework that allows researchers to analyze complex group behaviors across different species and environments.
Linking Algorithms to Neural Mechanisms in Predictive Memory Models
In a new paper, we demonstrate biologically-plausible neural network models that can compute important features of predictive learning and memory systems. Our results suggest that these features are more accessible in neural circuits than previously thought, and can support a broad range of cognitive functions. The work achieves something that has proved difficult in AI research: bridging a well-defined computational function with its neural mechanism.