From pixels to people AI shakes hands with the human brain

Artificial intelligence systems that gather visual cues from the environment, and learn from them, can recognize human faces more accurately than we can. But how do such systems make the leap from pixels to people? Weizmann Institute neuroscientists have now revealed part of the secret: the most advanced AI vision systems evolve as they learn, spontaneously creating connections that bear a surprising resemblance to how neural networks function in the human brain. The research, published in Nature Communications, was performed by Prof. Rafi Malach of the Department of Neurobiology, together with Shany Grossman, a graduate student in the Malach lab. Today's most advanced systems for artificial vision are based on an AI approach called deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs).