A brain–computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a brain–machine interface (BMI), is a direct communication link between the brain's electrical activity and an external device, most commonly a computer or robotic limb. BCIs are often directed at researching, mapping, assisting, augmenting, or repairing human cognitive or sensory-motor functions. They are often conceptualized as a human–machine interface that skips the intermediary of moving body parts (hands...), although they also raise the possibility of erasing the distinction between brain and machine. BCI implementations range from non-invasive and partially invasive to invasive, based on how physically close electrodes are to brain tissue.
Developmental robotics (DevRob), sometimes called epigenetic robotics, is a scientific field which aims at studying the developmental mechanisms, architectures and constraints that allow lifelong and open-ended learning of new skills and new knowledge in embodied machines. As in human children, learning is expected to be cumulative and of progressively increasing complexity, and to result from self-exploration of the world in combination with social interaction. The typical methodological approach consists in starting from theories of human and animal development elaborated in fields such as developmental psychology, neuroscience, developmental and evolutionary biology, and linguistics, then to formalize and implement them in robots, sometimes exploring extensions or variants of them. The experimentation of those models in robots allows researchers to confront them with reality, and as a consequence, developmental robotics also provides feedback and novel hypotheses on theories of human and animal development.
J. A. Scott Kelso is an American neuroscientist, and Professor of Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Professor of Psychology, Biological Sciences and Biomedical Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton, Florida and The University of Ulster in Derry, N. Ireland.
Kurt A. Thoroughman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He is known for his work in the study of motor control, motor learning, and computational neuroscience.
David J. Ostry is an engineer and neuroscientist whose research focuses on human motor control.
Bin He is a Chinese American biomedical engineering scientist. He is the Trustee Professor of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, professor by courtesy in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Professor of Neuroscience Institute, and was the head of the department of Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior, he was Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medtronic-Bakken Endowed Chair for Engineering in Medicine at the University of Minnesota. He previously served as the director of the Institute for Engineering in Medicine and the Center for Neuroengineering at the University of Minnesota. He was the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering and serves as the editor in chief of IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering. He was the president of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBS) from 2009 to 2010 and chair of International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering from 2018 to 2021.
Ferdinando (Sandro) Mussa-Ivaldi is an Italian born professor at Northwestern University. He is known for his contributions to the fields of motor control, motor learning and computational neuroscience.
Sensory-motor coupling is the coupling or integration of the sensory system and motor system. Sensorimotor integration is not a static process. For a given stimulus, there is no one single motor command. "Neural responses at almost every stage of a sensorimotor pathway are modified at short and long timescales by biophysical and synaptic processes, recurrent and feedback connections, and learning, as well as many other internal and external variables".
Motor babbling is a process of repeatedly performing a random motor command for a short duration. It is similar to the vocal babbling of infants, where the brain learns the relation between vocal muscle activities and the resulting sounds. However, it was found that the general motor-control system is already exploring itself in the womb, in animals, in a similar way. Originally, the random spasms and convulsions of the embryo were seen as the non-functional consequences of growth. Later it was realized that the motor system is already calibrating its sensorimotor system before birth. After birth, motor babbling in primates continues in the random grasping movements towards visual targets, training the hand–eye coordination system. These insights are used since the early nineteen nineties in models of biological movement control and in robotics. In robotics, it is a system of robot learning whereby a robotic system can autonomously develop an internal model of its self-body and its environment. Early work is by Kuperstein (1991) using a robot randomly positioning a stick in its workspace, while being observed by two cameras, using a neural network to associate poses of the stick with joint angles of the arm. This type of research has led to the research field of developmental robotics.
In neuroscience and motor control, the degrees of freedom problem or motor equivalence problem states that there are multiple ways for humans or animals to perform a movement in order to achieve the same goal. In other words, under normal circumstances, no simple one-to-one correspondence exists between a motor problem and a motor solution to the problem. The motor equivalence problem was first formulated by the Russian neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein: "It is clear that the basic difficulties for co-ordination consist precisely in the extreme abundance of degrees of freedom, with which the [nervous] centre is not at first in a position to deal."
Frank H. Guenther is an American computational and cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on the neural computations underlying speech, including characterization of the neural bases of communication disorders and development of brain–computer interfaces for communication restoration. He is currently a professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences and biomedical engineering at Boston University.
Daniel Mark Wolpert FRS FMedSci is a British medical doctor, neuroscientist and engineer, who has made important contributions in computational biology. He was Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge from 2005, and also became the Royal Society Noreen Murray Research Professorship in Neurobiology from 2013. He is now Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia University.
As humans move through their environment, they must change the stiffness of their joints in order to effectively interact with their surroundings. Stiffness is the degree to a which an object resists deformation when subjected to a known force. This idea is also referred to as impedance, however, sometimes the idea of deformation under a given load is discussed under the term "compliance" which is the opposite of stiffness . In order to effectively interact with their environment, humans must adjust the stiffness of their limbs. This is accomplished via the co-contraction of antagonistic muscle groups.
The Johns Hopkins University Department of Biomedical Engineering has both undergraduate and graduate biomedical engineering programs located at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Reza Shadmehr is an Iranian-American professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is known for his contributions to the fields of motor control, motor learning, and computational neuroscience.
Kinesiological Instrument for Normal and Altered Reaching Movement (KINARM) is an interactive robotic device designed to assess the sensorimotor and cognitive function of the brain through behavioural tasks using the upper limb. There are two types of KINARMs - the KINARM Exoskeleton and the KINARM End-Point. The technology is used by both basic and clinical researchers in order to develop a greater understanding of the neurological impacts of a variety of injuries and diseases. KINARMs allow researchers to collect more objective and quantitative data for assessing brain function than traditional methods. The devices are created by BKIN Technologies Ltd., doing business as Kinarm, in Kingston, Ontario.
Timothy P. Lillicrap is a Canadian neuroscientist and AI researcher, adjunct professor at University College London, and staff research scientist at Google DeepMind, where he has been involved in the AlphaGo and AlphaZero projects mastering the games of Go, Chess and Shogi. His research focuses on machine learning and statistics for optimal control and decision making, as well as using these mathematical frameworks to understand how the brain learns. He has developed algorithms and approaches for exploiting deep neural networks in the context of reinforcement learning, and new recurrent memory architectures for one-shot learning.
Auke Jan Ijspeert is a Swiss-Dutch roboticist and neuroscientist. He is a professor of biorobotics in the Institute of Bioengineering at EPFL, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and the head of the Biorobotics Laboratory at the School of Engineering.
Eberhard Erich Fetz is an American neuroscientist, academic and researcher. He is a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics and DXARTS at the University of Washington.
Gerald E. Loeb is an American neurophysiologist, biomedical engineer, academic and author. He is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Pharmacy and Neurology at the University of Southern California, the President of Biomed Concepts, and the co-founder of SynTouch.
