Copyright 2008 Josh Susskind
Photo of Josh Susskind

Academic Bio
Also: Download Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

I began PhD studies in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto in September 2004. My co-supervisors are:

Prof. Adam Anderson (Affect and Cognition Laboratory @ Psychology)
Prof. Geoffrey Hinton (Machine Learning @ Computer Science)

My primary interests are understanding how the brain encodes sensory information for use in social interaction, and how it determines mappings between sensory features and higher-level descriptions of the world. In particular, I investigate the intricacies of facial expressions, how their physical forms can be statistically characterized as visual action patterns, and how these patterns are perceived and conceptualized by computer models of the brain. My research is multi-disciplinary, using the tools of experimental psychology, neuroimaging (fMRI), and machine learning.

A related goal pursued jointly with Prof. Anderson is to understand the many variants of facial expressions and why they occur from a functional-evolutionary perspective.

Please see my Research and Publications pages for details and visit my Lab Webpage at UofT for additional topics under investigation.

In my studies of machine learning, I have become quite interested in how the brain learns to model the world by combining top down predictions with bottom up inference so as to generalize from experience and perform successfully in an uncertain world. I thus spend many hours building computational models that simulate these processes. Prof. Geoffrey Hinton is an amazing resource in this regard.

I believe the neural processes involved in forming causal models of the world are also involved during creative exploration and composition. Thus a future goal is to investigate how the brain uses its experience modeling the world to imagine sensory experience and to create novel actions that express patterns we find pleasing.