This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the NIPs conference in Long Beach, California. I attended a bunch of talks and learned a ton, organized an impromptu roundtable on Building AI Products, and met a bunch of great people, including some former TWiML Talk guests. In this episode I speak with Yael Niv, professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University. Yael joined me after her invited talk on “Learning State Representations.” In this interview Yael and I explore the relationship between neuroscience and machine learning. In particular, we discusses the importance of state representations in human learning, some of her experimental results in this area, and how a better understanding of representation learning can lead to insights into machine learning problems such as reinforcement and transfer learning. Did I mention this was a nerd alert show? I really enjoyed this interview and I know you will too. Be sure to send over any thoughts or feedback via the show notes page at twimlai.com/talk/92.