Learning at the crossroads of biology and computation

Discusses various avenues for exploiting biological learning mechanisms within machine learning. Special attention is given to the following issues: (a) the reasons for the wide variety of biological learning mechanisms; (b) the relation between lifetime and genetic learning; (c) a description of the driving forces of genetic learning and their use in evolutionary computation. Various symbolic machine learning and reasoning techniques can be used to complement (genetic and/or neural) sub-symbolic learning. A first approach uses symbolic induction for explaining the behavior of (genetically evolved) neural nets. Next, a general framework for the use of (symbolic) domain knowledge during genetic learning is introduced.<>