James DiCarlo
Director, MIT Quest for Intelligence; Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Investigator, McGovern Institute

Who they work with
Categories
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