[1] Ballard attended MIT and graduated in 1967 with his bachelor's degree in aeronautics and astronautics.
He then attended the University of Michigan for his masters in information and control engineering in 1970.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in information engineering in 1974.
[5] Written with RJ Rao, his paper "Predictive coding in the visual cortex: a functional interpretation of some extra-classical receptive-field effects" helped spark the rise of predictive coding as an influential framework for thinking about the brain and vision.
[6] Ballard's textbook titled "An Introduction to Natural Computation" (1997) combines introductory material on varied subjects relevant to computing in the brain, such as neural networks, reinforcement learning, and genetic learning.