James DiCarlo

James DiCarlo is the and director of the MIT Quest for Intelligence, the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science and a principal investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. His research focuses on using computational methods to understand the brain’s visual system, and with this knowledge, developing brain-machine interfaces to restore or augment lost senses. DiCarlo has received an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, a Pew Scholar Award, and a McKnight Scholar Award. He earned a PhD in biomedical engineering, and an MD, from Johns Hopkins University.

Selected Publications

• Dapello, J., Kar, K., Schrimpf, M., Geary, R.B., Ferguson, M., Cox, D.D., DiCarlo, J.J. (2023). Aligning Model and Macaque Inferior Temporal Cortex Representations Improves Model-to-Human Behavioral Alignment and Adversarial Robustness. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
• Gan, C., Zhou, S., Schwartz, J., Alter, S., Bhandwaldar, A., Gutfreund, D., Yamins, D.L.K., DiCarlo, J.J., McDermott, J., Torralba, A., Tenenbaum, J.B. (2022). The ThreeDWorld Transport Challenge: A Visually Guided Task-and-Motion Planning Benchmark Towards Physically Realistic Embodied AI. International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). IEEE Press, 8847–8854. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9812329
• Dapello, J., Feather, J., Le, H., Marques, T., Cox, D.D., McDermott, J.H., DiCarlo, J.J., Chung, S. (2021). Neural Population Geometry Reveals the Role of Stochasticity in Robust Perception. in proceedings Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

Media

• March 13, 2019: MIT News, How the brain distinguishes between objects.
• May 2, 2019: MIT News, Putting vision models to the test. 
• Feb. 3, 2018:. Wired, To Advance Artificial Intelligence, Reverse-Engineer the Brain.
• Sept. 17, 2018: Science News, Smarter AIs could help us understand how our brains interpret the world.

Videos