Professor Peter Dayan

Director, the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL
Email: dayan@gatesby.ucl.ac.uk
Web: click here

Peter Dayan read mathematics at Cambridge. After a brief period with a corporate strategy department at British Telecom, he became a graduate student in Physics at the University of Edinburgh, working with David Willshaw at the Centre for Cognitive Science. After getting his PhD, he did postdocs with Terry Sejnowski at the Salk Institute in San Diego, and Geoff Hinton at the University of Toronto. Following three years as an assistant professor at MIT, he moved to University College London to help found the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, subsequently becoming Director of the Unit in 2002.

His research interests concern mathematical and computational models of neural processing, with a particular emphasis on representation and learning. The main focus is on reinforcement learning and unsupervised learning, covering the ways that animals come to choose appropriate actions in the face of rewards and punishments, and the ways and goals of the process by which they come to form neural representations of the world. The models are informed and constrained by neurobiological, psychological and ethological data.