ThAT Thursdays: Fellowship Seminars
✦ ThAT Thursdays: Fellowship Seminars Christopher Hillar
We are pleased to announce an upcoming session of the Thinking About Thinking Fellowship Seminar Series, bringing together researchers and entrepreneurs working at the frontier of intelligence across AI, neuroscience, mathematics, and cognitive science.
𝑺𝒆𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒓 𝒕𝒊𝒕𝒍𝒆: From McCulloch-Pitts to Retina
𝑫𝒂𝒕𝒆: 28th May 2026
𝑻𝒊𝒎𝒆: 6pm BST
𝑳𝒐𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏: RIverside
I𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒗𝒊𝒆𝒘𝒆𝒅 𝒃𝒚: Anastasia Ilina
𝑺𝒖𝒑𝒑𝒐𝒓𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝒃𝒚: XTX Markets | Cooley LLP
For this session, Christopher Hillar will explore how theoretical constructs from biophysics profoundly shaped modern computing and artificial intelligence, from the McCulloch-Pitts theory of mind influencing John von Neumann and early computer design, through to the hierarchical neural network architectures underlying modern deep learning systems.
The seminar will trace this intellectual history as the backdrop for a new retina-inspired paradigm for digital sensory encoding, originally developed at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at University of California, Berkeley and now driving emerging applications in signal processing and AI systems.
Drawing from work across computational mathematics, perception, neural computation, and signal processing, Christopher will discuss how biologically inspired frameworks may inform the next generation of intelligent systems and sensory technologies.
𝑨𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒑𝒆𝒂𝒌𝒆𝒓:
Christopher Hillar is a PhD mathematician and researcher with expertise spanning computational mathematics, neural networks, and perception. He is a former researcher at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley and has held fellowships with the NSF and MSRI. His work bridges first-principles mathematics with applied AI systems, connecting foundational theory to scalable technological applications.
For a limited time, our seminar series remains open to the wider Thinking About Thinking network as an introduction to the Fellowship.
Bring your insightful questions and join the discussion.