Michael arbib biography

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. American computational neuroscientist. Early life and education [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Notify me of new comments via email. Cancel Report. Create a new account. Log In. Browse Biographies.

Quiz Are you a biography master? A Theresa May. I would say their mirror neurons in the robotic case are not as interesting as the brain mirror neurons. But there was also a collaboration between them and Daniel Wolpert in London on mental state inference where they would look at how you would have internal models for different actions and how you could deploy them in different combinations on the basis of the mirror neurons.

How can I add it to my repertoire? Who are some of the other partners in this international collaboration? You mentioned Parma and ATR. Okay, so I mentioned that my interest in hands started back in with the work of Marc Jeannerod, so he was the French anchor for this effort, Rizzolatti in Parma, Hideo Sakata who looked at the parietal cortex.

If I get that visual input what do I do with it? And then he, for a while, was very much engaged in motor control. So that was the initial group. And then we brought in other people to do some brain imaging in later years. And in the michael arbib biography year of that, one of the fellows who came to spend a year with us was Shun-ichi Amari, who has gone on to become the most influential person in the mathematical theory of neural networks in Japan.

I mean, that was many years ago, so — he came inI think. And so, that led to the fact that Stefan Schaal, who had been doing a postdoc for several years with Kawato — when he was looking for a university position. It sort of was on the basis of that longstanding arrangement with Kawato that I came to be able to recruit him here to USC.

How does the neural net — how do the neural networks of the brain change after a stroke? How can we help the patient recover their functionality? What do you think are some of the most significant neural models, or mathematical models, that have been influential in the evolution of robotics? Well, modeling the cerebellum has certainly had quite an impact.

There was the Cam model, which was directly influenced by that.

Michael arbib biography: University Professor Emeritus and

Jim Albus Editor's note: James S. So, thinking about the cerebellum, and then Michael Paulin, a New Zealander, was the one who really pushed using the Kalman filter as a model of the cerebellum, so that ties in with that brain influence work. So the interesting point there, I suppose, is that the field of robotics has moved, perhaps, out of its specialized niche into computer science, more generally, as we think about embedding computers in systems which have sophisticated sensors, and so on.

So that the-the skills that go into robotics are not just for animaloid or humanoid michaels arbib biography, but for very diverse vehicles, as it were, which can be platforms for integrating sensation and action. Well, JJ Gibson is where we started. Well, JJ Gibson, in terms of the general concept of optic flow, and then part of our work has been influenced by the general notion of affordances.

David Lee, in terms of looking at actual use of optic flow in controlling the dive of the gannet towards the water to catch the fish, and the judgment of pace length by people doing the long jump, and things of that kind. The debate with that man — and there actually was a debate when I was at UMass. We invited Gibson to come and debate me, because he had this idea of direct perception, the notion that, somehow, the brain just picked up affordances, including optic flow.

And we have to understand the neural networks that carry out these performances. No, no. But perhaps getting, also, a fuller understanding of what neural networks were about, if they were pure Gibsonians, who had just looked at what information is being picked up. Was it your sense that the people interested in robotics were less concerned about the symbolic AI-versus-neural-network paradigm struggle, and were more willing to engage with neural networks than the more traditional CS people that might have been more interested in the debate between neural nets and AI?

I think one has to be careful, because my sample is completely biased. So, in other words, I interacted with people who were interested interacting with me. And if they wanted to interact with me, then they wanted to see what they could learn in the way of biologically inspired robotics. The controllers were very simple for steering the robots, and so a lot of their work would be more at the planning stage.

So — but a — but the point is, that work of Rodney Brooks neatly complimented what Ron Arkin had taken from a more biological point of view, and sort of created sort of field of behavior-based robotics, and so on. I think, in the end, everybody realized, as Ron himself pushed, that you had to see how to integrate the delegation of many functions to perceptual and motor schemas.

We had an Israeli visitor named Israel Lieblich, and we were looking at mice, finding behavior in rats, which had gone out of fashion. But we were already influenced a little bit by the early finding on place cells in the hippocampus. And another thing interesting about it is that — I mean, just trivial personal history, but this, in some sense, was reinforcement learning before reinforcement learning existed, because we had — if the animal was hungry, then the reinforcement of food was what mattered.

If the animal was thirsty, the reinforcement of water was what mattered. In any case, avoiding a painful electric shock was important. So the central pattern generators were always interesting. So way, way, way back at Stanford, there were two people working on central pattern generators in insects. How can the controller adapt to that? And we came up with a very interesting model that explains some rather strange anomalies so that, if the hand is coming out like this, and you suddenly switch the size of the object, it may, in some case, not stay like this and go into the new size of the object, but it may actually sort of shrink down and open up again.

So we came up with an optimality criterion for the coupling, to say, basically, it cost you to hold the hand open. So that allowed us to explain, what, at first, looked like some very strange behavior that Jeannerod and his michaels arbib biography had observed in their work in France. You discussed a lot of different ways about how your work on different biological systems influenced things in robotics, and I was curious if your interaction to roboticists about your work in robotics, what kind of effect it had on the rest of your work.

Well, as I say, there was a specific period at UMass, with the lab for perceptual robotics, and then, when I came here, interacting with Becky, where we were actually looking at robots, as well as continuing the brain modeling. And there, there was a real conversation, thinking about the optic flow, in terms of how the robot could use it, fed into our thought about the other system.

Michael arbib biography: Early life and education.

And then thinking about hapsis, of the sense of touch, was influence by the robotics. And now there seems to be quite a push for cognitive robotics as a new area of research and expansion. And suddenly people in AI and cognitive science are talking about embodied AI, embodied robotics, but — I mean, not embodied robotics. Embodied cognition.

Yeah, probably. Might have been a couple of years earlier, but ish would be right. Well, it — when I was last at UMass, about three years ago, it was.

Michael arbib biography: Michael Anthony Arbib is an

And a guy name Rod Grupen was, at that time, leading it. And not only, as I said before, with a much wider range of robots than we had when I left, but nonetheless, building on the schema theory that I had initiated. And did you actually collaborate with Ken Salisbury Editor's note: Kenneth Salisbury at all, or you just worked with his hand?

Well, in terms of getting the hand and learning how to use it, we interacted with him. It was more that we were customers and he was pleased to be informed of what we were doing with it. What do you think are some of the future challenges in the field of brain robotics? He is also engaged in research on the evolution of brain mechanisms for human language, pursuing the Mirror System Hypothesis that links language parity the fact that what the speaker intends is roughly what the hearer understands to the properties of the mirror system for grasping -- neurons active for both the execution and observation of actions -- to explain amongst many other things why human brains can acquire sign language as readily as speech.

A new interest is working with architects to better understand the neuroscience of the architectural experience and to develop a new field of neuromorphic architecture, "brains for buildings". The author or editor of almost 40 books, Arbib has most recently edited "Who Needs Emotions?