An Amii researcher who is using machine learning to better understand how biological minds work has been named a CIFAR Global Scholar.
Erin Grant, an Amii Fellow, Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and incoming associate professor in both the Departments of Psychology and Computer Science, was one of 15 researchers in the latest cohort of CIFAR Global Scholars. The program is designed to support exceptional early-career researchers, helping them “develop and lead high-risk, high-reward interdisciplinary research” into critical questions facing the world.
Not only do they have these people who are across these disciplines, but they're also leaders in these disciplines, people who are sort of pushing boundaries.”
Erin Grant
Amii Fellow and Canada CIFAR AI Chair
“I'm really excited. They've collected a group of people who are across disciplines, such as neuroscience, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and also cognitive science,” Grant says.
“And not only do they have these people who are across these disciplines, but they're also leaders in these disciplines, people who are sort of pushing boundaries.”
One of the fundamental aspects of the CIFAR Global Scholar program is its support of interdisciplinary research, fostering collaborations between different scientific fields. Grant says that finding funding and support for interdisciplinary research can be especially challenging, making programs like this all the more important.
“The whole impact is not seen by any one discipline, so traditional funders and departments sometimes have trouble recognizing the impact of the work … I'm honored because CIFAR has been funding transformative research for decades,” she says.
Grant is one of the new Canada CIFAR AI Chair announcements that is part of a $24 million investment that the organization announced during Amii’s Upper Bound conference in May. Thanks to the successful completion of its AI+X cluster hire, Amii is now home to 32 Canada CIFAR AI Chairs.
Grant’s work is at the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience: she studies the way that both artificial and natural intelligences represent information. As she puts it, she uses neural network models to do complex cognitive tasks — things like language use, planning, and reasoning. By examining the solutions that these models use to accomplish these tasks, she aims to find out if similar processes happen in our own minds.
“Primarily, my interest is in explaining human cognition. I'm really interested in humans, but now we have systems that exhibit some of the capacities of humans,” she says.
Grant hopes that her involvement in the Global Scholar program will open up the options for further collaboration with other neuroscience researchers, to allow her to test if the solutions she sees in artificial models are analogous to those in natural actors, and how they differ. Grant joins 14 other early-career researchers from countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa, and Switzerland in the latest cohort of the CIFAR Global Scholars Program. Their research ranges from machine learning and neuroscience to quantum materials, microbiology, and Indigenous legal traditions.