Byoung-Tak Zhang

Office: Room 302-323 (New Engineering Building)
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University
Seoul 151-744, Korea

Phone: +82-2-880-1833 (office), 880-1847 (secretary)
Fax: +82-2-875-2240

Email:btzhang@bi.snu.ac.kr

Old Website:bi.snu.ac.kr/~btzhang

How does the biological mind work? How does the brain build a model of the world to instantly and robustly act on it? What kinds of processing and organizational mechanisms allow the brain to learn so rapidly, flexibly, and continuously in a noisy, dynamic, and changing environment? How can we build smart machines that perceive, think, act, and learn like the human brain and mind? In the Biointelligence Lab and the Cognitive Robotics and ArtificialIntelligence Center (CRAIC) we pursue these questions using diverse methods of cognitive modeling, computational neuroscience, robotics, and computer science.

We build robotic surrogates by "cloning" the embodied and situated mind using wearable sensors, such as smart glasses, watches, brain scanners, body sensors, and mobile devices. We collect human activity data by long-term life-tracking in the real world. Based on these observational data, we reverse-engineer the brain architecture by exploring the plausible neurocognitive models that best explain the mind in working. We also use videos and cartoons to study how the cognitive brain constructs episodic memory and mental imagery from a long sequence of context-rich events while watching dramas and movies.

Our current efforts center around the deep, recurrent, and sparse hypernetwork architectures and learning algorithms that self-organize their structures instantly, incrementally, and continuously in a self-supervised way by perception-action cycle. The ultimate goal is to discover a large-scale, neurocognitive computational model of the brain that autonomously develops or evolves into human-level machine intelligence in lifelong interactions with the environment.

1992: PhD in Computer Science (Informatik), University of Bonn, Germany

1988: MS in Computer Science & Engineering, Seoul National University

1986: BS in Computer Science & Engineering, Seoul National University

Balancing accuracy and parsimony in genetic programming, Evolutionary Computation, 3(1):17-38, 1995.

Accelerated learning by active example selection, International Journal of Neural Systems, 5(1):67-75, 1994.

Evolving optimal neural networks using genetic algorithms with Occam's razor, Complex Systems, 7(3):199-220, 1993.

POSCO Chair Professor of Computer Science and Director of SNU AI Institute

Professor of Computer Science and Engineering (since 1997), Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul

Director, Video Intelligence Center (VIC) (2017-Present)