SSP Distinguished Speaker Lecture: Josh Tenenbaum

Monday, May 11, 2026
Building 420, Room 040
Stanford University
420-040
Joshua Tenenbaum

Joshua Tenenbaum

The
Symbolic Systems Program
presents

The Annual Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker Lecture for 2026

What kind of symbolic system is the brain?

Joshua B. Tenenbaum
Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Monday, May 11, 2026
5-6:30 pm

Hybrid event:

ABSTRACT:

Cognitive scientists have long studied the mind as a system for building abstract, causal, probabilistic models of the world, and using those internal models to guide decisions and action. Artificial intelligence researchers have made great strides towards replicating some of these capacities in machines. All of these models are in some sense "symbolic systems", whether they are implemented explicitly as symbolic programs, implicitly in the weights and activations of a neural network, or in some hybrid neuro-symbolic system. Yet a mechanistic basis of how these computations are implemented physically in the brain remains elusive. I will discuss prospects for how progress in cognitive science and AI might lead us to a better understanding of the brain as a symbolic system, and how in turn, such an understanding of the brain might point the way to AI systems that are more robust, rational, and resource-efficient

BIO:

Josh Tenenbaum is Professor of Computational Cognitive Science in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a principal investigator at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and a thrust leader in the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM). His research centers on perception, learning, and common-sense reasoning in humans and machines, with the twin goals of better understanding human intelligence in computational terms and building more human-like intelligence in machines. The machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms developed by his group are currently used by hundreds of other science and engineering groups around the world.

Tenenbaum received his PhD from MIT in 1999, and was an Assistant Professor at Stanford University from 1999 to 2002 before returning to MIT. His papers have received awards at the Cognitive Science (CogSci), Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), and Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) conferences, the International Conference on Learning and Development (ICDL) and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). He has given invited keynote talks at all of the major machine learning and artificial conferences, as well as the main meetings of the Cognitive Science Society, the Cognitive Development Society, the Society for Mathematical Psychology, and held distinguished lectureships at Stanford University, the University of Amsterdam, McGill University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Arizona. He is the recipient of the Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, and the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, and is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and the Cognitive Science Society.

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