21.11.23 - Christos Papadimitriou

This talk will present recent work on a neuromorphic artifact encompassing simulated spiking neurons, random synapses with random initial weights, and Hebbian plasticity -- without backpropagation -- which is capable of basic language acquisition: When exposed to a modest number of grounded sentences in any natural language (all terms to be defined), it acquires the ability to comprehend and generate correctly sentences in the same language.  The talk will also discuss current challenges concerning scaling and abstract words.