With Barbara Oakley, he co-created and taught Learning How To Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects, the world's most popular online course,[5] available on Coursera.[6]
While in Princeton for his M.A. in physics, he analyzed the strength of gravitational waves from all known sources at the time, and the required sensitivity needed for detection. He noticed that all gravitational wave detectors were 1000x too insensitive to detect, and, thinking that the requisite detectors would not appear until 30 years later, decided to go into a different field.[8]
He has had a long-standing affiliation with the California Institute of Technology, as a Wiersma Visiting Professor of Neurobiology in 1987, as a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar in 1993 and as a part-time Visiting Professor 1995–1998. In 2004, he was named the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute and the director of the Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biology.
His research in neural networks and computational neuroscience has been pioneering. In the early 1980s, particularly following work by John Hopfield, computer simulations of neural networks became widespread. Early applications, particularly by Sejnowski and Geoffrey Hinton, demonstrated that simple neural networks could be made to learn tasks of at least some sophistication. In 1989, Sejnowski founded Neural Computation, published by the MIT Press, the leading journal in neural networks and computational neuroscience. He is also the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, a non-profit organization that oversees the annual NeurIPS Conference. This interdisciplinary meeting brings together researchers from many disciplines, including biology, physics, mathematics, and engineering.
The central issues being addressed are how dendrites integrate synaptic signals in neurons, how networks of neurons generate dynamical patterns of activity, how sensory information is represented in the cerebral cortex, how memory representations are formed and consolidated during sleep, and how visuo-motor transformations are adaptively organized. His laboratory has developed new methods for analyzing the sources for electrical and magnetic signals recorded from the scalp and hemodynamic signals from functional neuroimaging by blind separation using ICA. The EEGLAB public software which was as of 2012 the most popular software for processing EEG data was originally developed in his laboratory.[28]
Symposia
He has participated and spoken at the Beyond Belief symposia in 2006 and 2007. He participated in the conference Waking Up to Sleep at the Salk Institute in February 2007 (online video available).[29]
Membership
Sejnowski was a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health for the Brain Research through Application of Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative,[30] announced by President Obama on 2 April 2013. Their BRAIN 2025 report[31] was released by NIH on 5 June 2014 and has been used to prioritize NIH BRAIN Initiative projects. He was previously part of a team of engineers and neuroscientists who developed the Brain Activity Map Project, which served as the template for the BRAIN Initiative.[32]
Authorship
In 1992, Sejnowski co-authored The Computational Brain with Patricia Churchland[33] and in 2002 the book Liars, Lovers, and Heroes; What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We are with Steven R. Quartz.[34] His book, The Deep Learning Revolution, was published by the MIT Press in June 2018. His most recent book, ChatGPT and the Future of AI: The Deep Language Revolution, will published by the MIT Press in October 2024.
He has co-created (with Professor Barbara Oakley) and teaches Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects, a massive open online course offered on Coursera. The course had its first three runs in August and October 2014 and January 2015, when it attracted approximately 300,000 students. In 2015, enrollment in the course reached 1 million,[5] a total of about 2 million students as of August 2017, 3 million students as of 2021, and 4 million students as of 2024.
^ abMarkoff, John (29 December 2015). "The Most Popular Online Course Teaches You to Learn". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 January 2016. The world's most popular online course is a general introduction to the art of learning, taught jointly by an educator and a neuroscientist.
^"Terrence Sejnowski, May 7, 2018". Engineering-Driven Medicine Distinguished Lecture. Stony Brook University College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Retrieved 13 June 2022.
^Ackley, D. H. Hinton, G. E. Sejnowski, T. J. A Learning Algorithm for Boltzmann Machines*, Cognitive Science, 9, 147–169, 1985
^Sejnowski, T. J. Rosenberg, C. R. Parallel Networks That Learn to Pronounce English Text, Complex Systems, 1, 145–168, 198
^Lehky, S. R. Sejnowski, T. J. Network Model of Shape-from-Shading: Neural Function Arises from Both Receptive and Projective Fields, Nature, 333, 452–454, 1988
^Bell, A. J. Sejnowski, T. J. An Information-Maximization Approach to Blind Separation and Blind Deconvolution, Neural Computation, 7, 1129–1159, 1995
^Coggan, J. S. Bartol, T. M. Jr. Esquenazi, E. I. Stiles, J. R. Lamont, S. Martone, M. E. Berg, D. K. Ellisman, M. H. Sejnowski, T. J. Evidence for Ectopic Neurotransmission at a Neuronal Synapse, Science, 39, 446–451, 2005
^Makeig, S., Westerfield, M., Jung, T.-P., Enghoff, S., Townsend, J., Courchesne, E., Sejnowski, T. J. Dynamic brain sources of visual evoked responses. Science, 295: 690–694(2002)