Peter Dayan

Peter Dayan is a British neuroscientist and computer scientist who is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. He has pioneered the field of reinforcement learning (RL) where he and his colleagues proposed that dopamine signals reward prediction error, and helped develop the Q-learning algorithm. an influential textbook on computational neuroscience. He is also known for applying Bayesian methods from machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand neural function, and is particularly recognized for relating neurotransmitter levels to prediction errors and Bayesian uncertainties. He made contributions to unsupervised learning, including the wake-sleep algorithm for neural networks and the Helmholtz machine.

Education Dayan studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge and then continued for a PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics on statistical learning supervised by David Willshaw and David Wallace, focusing on associative memory and reinforcement learning. In September 2018, the Max Planck Society announced his appointment as a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen.

Awards and honours Dayan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018. In 2023, he was elected a member of the Academia Europaea. He was awarded the Rumelhart Prize in 2012 and The Brain Prize in 2017.