Congratulations to UF BME Ph.D. student, Peng Liu, who has received an Informatics Institute (UFII) Graduate Student Fellowship for his project titled, Neuroscience Inspired Deep Learning.

The project aims at understanding how the human brain processes emotional information. Scientific studies have shown that emotion is a high-level cognitive process associated with complex interactions among different brain regions. Understanding the neural basis of emotional processing is important for us to learn how the brain works and has the potential to shed light on emotional dysfunctions characteristic of many neurological and psychiatric disorders. During the fellowship, Liu will design deep neural networks, inspired by the biological and cognitive principles of the human brain, that are capable of evaluating the motivational significance of natural images containing varying degrees of pleasant, unpleasant and neutral affective content.

Liu researches in the SMILE laboratory, directed by Dr. Ruogu Fang, assistant professor, and his dissertation committee is co-chaired by Dr. Mingzhou Ding, Distinguished Professor & J. Crayton Pruitt Family Professor. This timely fellowship aligns well with his long-term goal to combine neuroscience with tools from artificial intelligence, especially deep learning, to develop advanced computational models of the human brain and the next-generation neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence.