Tomaso Poggio of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will receive the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience. Poggio is the director of the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, a center funded by the National Science Foundation that seeks to advance our understanding of human intelligence by building smarter machines. For decades, Poggio has worked to create computational models of how the brain functions. Specifically, he has developed models that mimic the ways that humans learn to recognize objects such as faces, and actions such as motion--applications now present in digital cameras and some cars. Poggio is working to develop more complex models that mimic the signals that the human brain uses during visual recognition, with the ultimate goal of better understanding how the brain works and applying this technology to build intelligent machines.

Credit: Oliviero Toscani 2012.