Presidential Lectures

Depression is a common, chronic, and debilitating disease. Although many patients benefit from antidepressant medications or other therapies, only about half show complete remission. Factors that precipitate depression, such as stress, are incompletely understood. We have used chronic social defeat stress as an animal model of depression. Prolonged exposure to an aggressor induces lasting changes in behavior such as social avoidance and anhedonia-like symptoms, which are reversed by chronic (but not acute) treatment with available antidepressants.

Advances in molecular genetics have implicated a variety of genetic variations in autism, yet understanding of what these variations mean is still limited. Advances in classification of diseases have made autism among the most reliably diagnosed neurodevelopmental or neuropsychiatric disorders. But symptoms used to define autism are likely outcomes of earlier disruptions in normative social and communication development rather than causally linked to genetic perturbations.

Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI) is a new paradigm that uses an intelligent agent (a ‘nontrivial teacher’) to supplement standard training data in the context of supervised learning algorithms. Rather than using standard, brute-force methods to address the general problem of inference and the construction of intelligent machines, the LUPI learning model allows the teacher to add additional (privileged) information to the training examples.