Blake Richards is associate professor in the School of Computer Science and Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University. He is also a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and core academic member at Mila = the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. His research lies at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. His laboratory investigates universal principles of intelligence that apply to both natural and artificial agents. He spearheaded the formulation of the “deep-learning framework” for neuroscience, published in 2019, which helped to shape conversations in neuroscience on how to study neural circuits from a perspective based on objective functions, learning rules and circuit architectures.
Richards earned his B.Sc. in cognitive science and artificial intelligence at the University of Toronto, and his D.Phil. in neuroscience at the University of Oxford, where he studied visual plasticity in Xenopus laevis tadpoles with Colin Akerman. He did his postdoctoral fellowship at SickKids Hospital with Paul Frankland, where he studied memory consolidation in mice. More recently, his lab has contributed to theories on the role of apical dendrites in credit assignment and how predictive learning could account for the structure of representations in the brain.
