Christof Koch

References

(Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christof_Koch Retrieved:2014-10-3.
- Christof Koch (^[1] born November 13, 1956) is an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural bases of consciousness. He is the Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 until 2013, he was the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology at the California Institute of Technology.

Antonio Regalado. (2014). “Interview with Christof Koch."
- Regalado: Do you think we will ever build conscious machines?
  Christof Koch: I’m not sure why we would. But there is no question in my mind that we will build smart machines that can pass the Turing test well before we understand the true biological basis of human intelligence. And I think there are dangers associated with that which most people, being blithe optimists, completely ignore.
- Regalado: What dangers?
  Christof Koch: Don’t you watch science fiction movies? “Runaway AI” of course. Think about the financial market, all those trading machines, flash crashes. People are going to abuse computer intelligence, blindly maximize for some goal. It’s going to lead to more and more concentration of power among fewer and fewer people. We see this already, it’s going to lead to massive unemployment. And maybe 30 or 40 years on I think there is really an existentialist danger to the species, at the level of nuclear weapons or a meteorite strike.

(Harel et al., 2006) ⇒ Jonathan Harel, Christof Koch, and Pietro Perona. “Graph-based visual saliency." In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 545-552. 2006.

(Itti et al., 2001) ⇒ Laurent Itti, and Christof Koch. “Computational modelling of visual attention." Nature reviews neuroscience 2, no. 3 (2001): 194-203.

(Itti et al., 1998) ⇒ Laurent Itti, Christof Koch, and Ernst Niebur. “A model of saliency-based visual attention for rapid scene analysis." IEEE Transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence 20, no. 11 (1998): 1254-1259.

(Crick & Koch, 1990) ⇒ Francis Crick, and Christof Koch. “Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness." (1990). In: Seminars in the Neurosciences, vol. 2, pp. 263-275. Saunders Scientific Publications, 1990.
- ABSTRACT: Visual awareness is a favorable form of consciousness to study neurobiologically. We propose that it takes two forms: a very fast form, linked to iconic memory, that may be difficult to study; and a somewhat slower one involving visual attention and short-term memory. In the slower form an attentional mechanism transiently binds together all those neurons whose activity relates to the relevant features of a single visual object. We suggest this is done by generating coherent semi-synchronous oscillations, probably in the 40-70 Hz range. These oscillations then activate a transient short-term (working) memory. We outfit several lines of experimental work that might advance the understanding of the neural mechanisms involved. The neural basis of very short-term memory especially needs more experimental study.