NTT Research Inc., a division of NTT announced that it has entered a joint research agreement with scientists at Harvard University to study animal neuro-responses with the hope of informing future artificial intelligence systems. The five-year research project, launched in the fall of 2021, enables researchers at the two organizations to collaboratively study how animals maintain behavioral flexibility, specifically in the task of navigation. Greater understanding of how this challenge is approached in biology may eventually enable the design of new computing machines with similar capabilities. Murthy's counterpart at NTT Research for the joint project is Physics & Informatics (PHI) Lab Research Scientist Gautam Reddy, PhD, who was previously an Independent Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard's NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Biology.

This joint research aims to better elucidate how animals maintain the ability to respond appropriately to a wide variety of complex real-world scenarios. The investigators expect the results from one aspect of the research to be a source of new, biologically inspired ideas for artificial reinforcement learning systems that rely on representation learning. Such ideas have played a major role in recent advances in artificial intelligence.

Results from another aspect of the research should provide a quantitative understanding of how animals track trails, as well as identify the basic elements of general behavioral strategies that perform flexibly and reliably in the real world. Professor Murthy's lab has a long track record in experimental and computational neurobiology. Expertise relevant to the joint research includes the ability to record from or image many individual neurons in the brain while an animal performs behavioral tasks.

This technical expertise will enable the research team to understand what computations are performed by biological neural networks when an animal is navigating in a complex world.