Cao’s Cognitive Science Contributes to AI Initiative
Assistant Professor Rui Cao’s neuroscience research not only is helping explain how the brain works but could lead to advances in artificial intelligence.
Assistant Professor Rui Cao joined UT this academic year as part of the Foundational Artificial Intelligence (AI) cluster, one of the initiatives empowering faculty to collaborate across disciplines to address the nation’s greatest challenges.
The Foundational AI cluster focuses on deepening our understanding of cognitive neuroscience and applying those insights to developing AI solutions that will make life and lives better.
Cao’s research uses computational models to bring together insights from psychology and neuroscience to understand how the brain represents time in ways that support rich and flexible behavior.
“Recently, in collaboration with neuroscientists at Boston University, my lab has applied these approaches to the hippocampus—the brain’s memory center—to better understand how experiences are stabilized and transformed,” Cao said. “We found that astrocytes, a previously underappreciated type of brain cell, play a crucial role in signaling which memories are important and in supporting consolidation across days.”
“By building a more complete picture of how biological learning works, this research may inspire new generations of artificial systems that can learn more effectively,” she said.
As a doctoral student Cao trained in mathematical psychology, expressing theories of memory and learning in the form of equations. “Over time, I became increasingly curious about how those equations might actually be implemented by populations of neurons, which led me to move into computational neuroscience for my postdoctoral work,” she said.
“I’m continually struck by how remarkably rich behavior can arise from surprisingly simple ways that brain cells organize and update information. That curiosity continues to drive what I work on today,” Cao said.