Peter Dayan is a British

neuroscientist A neuroscientist (or neurobiologist) is a scientist specializing in neuroscience that deals with the anatomy and function of neurons, Biological neural network, neural circuits, and glia, and their Behavior, behavioral, biological, and psycholo ...

and

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

who is director at the

Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics The Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics is located in Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is one of 80 institutes in the Max Planck Society (Max Planck Gesellschaft). It was founded in 1968. The institute is studying signal a ...

Tübingen Tübingen (; ) is a traditional college town, university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer (Neckar), Ammer rivers. about one in ...

, Germany, along with

Ivan De Araujo Ivan De Araujo is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, along with Peter Dayan. He is known for his seminal investigations on sugar preference and on the reward functions of the gut-brain axis. ...

. He is co-author of ''Theoretical Neuroscience'', an influential textbook on

computational neuroscience Computational neuroscience (also known as theoretical neuroscience or mathematical neuroscience) is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematics, computer science, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand th ...

. He is known for applying

Bayesian method Bayesian inference ( or ) is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to calculate a probability of a hypothesis, given prior evidence, and update it as more information becomes available. Fundamentally, Bayesian inferen ...

s from

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

to understand neural function and is particularly recognized for relating

neurotransmitter A neurotransmitter is a signaling molecule secreted by a neuron to affect another cell across a Chemical synapse, synapse. The cell receiving the signal, or target cell, may be another neuron, but could also be a gland or muscle cell. Neurotra ...

levels to prediction errors and Bayesian uncertainties. He has pioneered the field of

reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an interdisciplinary area of machine learning and optimal control concerned with how an intelligent agent should take actions in a dynamic environment in order to maximize a reward signal. Reinforcement learnin ...

(RL) where he and his colleagues proposed that dopamine signals reward prediction error and helped develop the

Q-learning ''Q''-learning is a reinforcement learning algorithm that trains an agent to assign values to its possible actions based on its current state, without requiring a model of the environment ( model-free). It can handle problems with stochastic tra ...

algorithm, and he made contributions to

unsupervised learning Unsupervised learning is a framework in machine learning where, in contrast to supervised learning, algorithms learn patterns exclusively from unlabeled data. Other frameworks in the spectrum of supervisions include weak- or semi-supervision, wh ...

, including the

wake-sleep algorithm The wake-sleep algorithm is an unsupervised learning algorithm for deep Generative model, generative models, especially Helmholtz machine, Helmholtz Machines. The algorithm is similar to the Expectation–maximization algorithm, expectation-maximi ...

for

neural network A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a network can perfor ...

s and the Helmholtz machine.

Education

Dayan studied mathematics at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

and then continued for a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

at the

University of Edinburgh School of Informatics The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former department of artificial intel ...

on statistical learning supervised by David Willshaw and David Wallace, focusing on

associative In mathematics, the associative property is a property of some binary operations that rearranging the parentheses in an expression will not change the result. In propositional logic, associativity is a valid rule of replacement for express ...

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...

and

Career and research

After his PhD, Dayan held

postdoctoral research A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). Postdocs most commonly, but not always, have a temporary acade ...

positions with Terry Sejnowski at the

Salk Institute The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is a scientific research institute in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California. The independent, non-profit institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine; among th ...

and

Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton (born 1947) is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and cognitive psychologist known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title "the Godfather of AI". Hinton is Univer ...

at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

. He then took up an assistant professor position at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT), and moved to the

Gatsby Charitable Foundation The Gatsby Charitable Foundation is an endowed grant-making trust based in London, founded by David Sainsbury in 1967. The organisation is one of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts set up to provide funding for charitable causes. Although the ...

computational neuroscience unit at

University College London University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...

(UCL) in 1998, becoming professor and director in 2002. In September 2018, the

Max Planck Society The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, it was renamed to the M ...

announced his appointment as a director at the

Awards and honours

Dayan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: In 2023, he was elected a member of the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of humanities, letters, law, and sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europe ...

. He was awarded the

Rumelhart Prize The David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition was founded in 2001 in honor of the cognitive scientist David Rumelhart to introduce the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for cognitive science. It is aw ...

in 2012 and

The Brain Prize The Brain Prize, formerly known as The Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize, is an international scientific award honouring "one or more scientists who have distinguished themselves by an outstanding contribution to neuroscience and who are ...

in 2017.

References

Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Living people Jewish scientists Rumelhart Prize laureates Fellows of the Royal Society Members of Academia Europaea 1965 births Alumni of the University of Cambridge Max Planck Institute directors Academics of University College London {{neuroscientist-stub

Education

Career and research

Awards and honours

See also

References