Shahab Bakhtiari is assistant professor of psychology at the University of Montreal and an associate academic member of the Mila-Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. His research investigates visual perception and learning in both biological brains and artificial neural networks. He uses deep learning as a computational framework to model learning and perception in the brain, aiming to leverage insights from the nervous system to develop more biologically inspired and human-aligned AI systems.
Bakhtiari earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in electrical engineering at the University of Tehran and his Ph.D. in neuroscience at McGill University. He completed postdoctoral research at Mila, where he focused on work at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence.