In 1982, he joined the faculty of the Department of Biophysics at the Johns Hopkins University, where he achieved the rank of Professor before moving to San Diego, California in 1988.
In 2004, he was named the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute and the director of the Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biology.
He became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2000 for fundamental advances in the theory and practice of neural networks and for contributions to computational neuroscience.
[20] In 2024, he was awarded The Brain Prize for pioneering work in theoretical neuroscience alongside Larry Abbott and Haim Sompolinsky.
Early applications, particularly by Sejnowski and Geoffrey Hinton, demonstrated that simple neural networks could be made to learn tasks of at least some sophistication.
He is also the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, a non-profit organization that oversees the annual NeurIPS Conference.
He co-invented the Boltzmann machine[23] with Geoffrey Hinton and pioneered the application of learning algorithms to difficult problems in speech (NETtalk)[24] and vision.
[25] His postdoc, Tony Bell, developed the infomax algorithm for Independent Component Analysis (ICA)[26] which has been widely adopted in machine learning, signal processing and data mining.
Hippocampal and cortical slice preparations are being used to explore the properties of single neurons and synapses, including the precision of spike firing and the influence of neuromodulators.
[27] The central issues being addressed are how dendrites integrate synaptic signals in neurons, how networks of neurons generate dynamical patterns of activity, how sensory information is represented in the cerebral cortex, how memory representations are formed and consolidated during sleep, and how visuo-motor transformations are adaptively organized.
His most recent book, ChatGPT and the Future of AI: The Deep Language Revolution, will published by the MIT Press in October 2024.