TILOS Seminar with Thomas Serre (Brown)
Thomas Serre, Brown University
Abstract: TBA
Dr. Serre is the Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science and Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences and Computer Science at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from MIT in 2006 and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Télécom Bretagne in France in 2000. His research spans computational neuroscience, NeuroAI, and computer vision. He studies the computational principles of biological vision, including the roles of recurrent and feedback processing and neural dynamics, and develops brain-inspired models and benchmarks that compare human and machine vision. His work has been featured by the BBC, The Economist, New Scientist, and Scientific American.
Dr. Serre serves as the Faculty Director of the Center for Computation and Visualization and the Associate Director of the Center for Computational Brain Science. He is also an affiliate of the Carney Institute for Brain Science, the Center for Theoretical Physics and Innovation, and the Data Science Institute at Brown University. He holds an International Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute in France and is an elected Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).
He has served as an area chair and senior program committee member for machine learning and computer vision conferences, including AAAI, CVPR, ICML, ICLR, and NeurIPS. He is a Senior Editor of Minds, Machines, and Brains (MIT Press) and served as Deputy Editor and Neuroscience Section Editor of PLOS Computational Biology from 2021 to 2026.
His awards include an NSF Early Career Award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, a DARPA Director’s Award, and Brown’s Mid-Career Research Achievement Award (2024). With his team, he received the 2021 IEEE PAMI Helmholtz Prize and the 2022 IEEE PAMI Mark Everingham Prize for work on human action recognition.