Lyes Khacef has received the first thesis prize from the STIC doctoral school d'Université Côte d’Azur!

Lyes Khacef has received the first thesis prize from the STIC doctoral school in d'Université Côte d’Azur. The thesis discusses the modeled self-organized artificial neural networks thanks to a mechanism of structural plasticity to create or cut connections, as well as a mechanism of synaptic plasticity which allows to modify the strength of these connections. CogniGron is congratulating Lyes for this achievement and is happy to have him now working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen in the Bioinspired Circuit and System research group (CogniGron).

Self-organization, also called neuroplasticity, is the ability of biological neurons to create, modify or break connections between them in order to learn and adapt to the environment. Indeed, intelligence is often defined as the ability to adapt to change through learning. In the doctoral thesis of Lyes Khacef, he modeled self-organized artificial neural networks thanks to a mechanism of structural plasticity to create or cut connections, as well as a mechanism of synaptic plasticity which allows to modify the strength of these connections. The main paradigm shift of his thesis is to use these local plasticity mechanisms from which the representations of the system emerge in an efficient manner. Thus, the model that he proposed (ReSOM: Reentrant Self-Organizing Map) is able to calculate in a distributed way, to learn in an unsupervised way and to exploit several sensory modalities, such as vision, hearing and touch it in order to improve its perception of the environment.

For more information please also read the summary at ercim news.