Welcome Cameron Buckner!

Professor Cameron Buckner will assume the position of visiting fellow at the Eindhoven Center for the Philosophy of AI (ECPAI) during the period of 17th June 2024 to 5th July 2024.

Buckner is one of the leading philosophical voices on theoretical issues in artificial intelligence generally and deep learning specifically. His research centers on the question of whether and to what extent data-driven neural networks can be considered rational agents, appealing to philosophical and psychological conceptions of rationality as well as to the engineering details of deep neural networks and transformer models. Buckner’s research focus and interdisciplinary training would complement the existing strengths of the Philosophy & Ethics group and Eindhoven Center for Philosophy of AI, while allowing him to actively contribute with several AI research groups at the departments of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering

Buckner will deliver a research talk at the Philosophy & Ethics and Eindhoven Center for Philosophy of AI seminar on several chapters of his book, each of which focuses on empiricist theorizing about a particular mental faculty and how modeling them using deep neural network modules can help bootstrap models to greater degrees of rational flexibility.

Moreover, on 26th and 27th June he will lead a Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute (EAISI) masterclass for researchers, PhD candidates, postdocs, and (advanced) MSc students on whether large language models are just next-word prediction machines or they also represent the world.

Finally, Buckner will give a EAISI lecture on 1st July on the topic of interventional methods for relating representations in DNNs to representations in the brain.