# The Algonauts Project: A Platform for Communication between the Sciences of Biological and Artificial Intelligence

## TL;DR

The Algonauts Project creates a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration, using a benchmark to evaluate AI models' ability to predict human brain activity during visual object recognition, aiming to enhance understanding of natural and artificial intelligence.

## Contribution

It introduces a structured challenge and benchmark for comparing AI models with brain data, fostering collaboration between AI and neuroscience research.

## Key findings

- AI models can predict human brain activity with varying accuracy
- The benchmark facilitates systematic evaluation of models against neural data
- The project promotes interdisciplinary insights into perception and cognition

## Abstract

In the last decade, artificial intelligence (AI) models inspired by the brain have made unprecedented progress in performing real-world perceptual tasks like object classification and speech recognition. Recently, researchers of natural intelligence have begun using those AI models to explore how the brain performs such tasks. These developments suggest that future progress will benefit from increased interaction between disciplines. Here we introduce the Algonauts Project as a structured and quantitative communication channel for interdisciplinary interaction between natural and artificial intelligence researchers. The project's core is an open challenge with a quantitative benchmark whose goal is to account for brain data through computational models. This project has the potential to provide better models of natural intelligence and to gather findings that advance AI. The 2019 Algonauts Project focuses on benchmarking computational models predicting human brain activity when people look at pictures of objects. The 2019 edition of the Algonauts Project is available online: http://algonauts.csail.mit.edu/.