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May 17, Tuesday
12:00 – 14:00

The nervous system analyses sensory information and orchestrates motor commands.Many artificially engineered systems face similar challenges. Following the notion of cybernetics we strive to boost both scientific and technological research by exploring the differences between artificial control theory and the biological motor control.

The brain contains internal representation of our limbs and our external environment and can flexibly modify these internal mapping. With psychophysical experiments (that expose subjects to altered feedback or force perturbations) and computational modeling we try to explore the structure of this internal representation its capabilities and limitations.

In this talk I will review my previous studies and my current ongoing studies that employ tools from control theory (In particular bang-bang optimal control and adaptive control) and explore trajectory formation and representation of time, of delay and of rhythmic movements.

Finally I will discuss our future research plans to employ these models to extend our hands by direct brain interfaces and by the tele-presence technologies of the future.

Biosketch:

Amir Karniel received the B.Sc. degree (Cum Laude) in 1993, the M.Sc. degree in 1996, and the Ph.D. degree in 2000, all in Electrical Engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. He received the award for consistent distinguished instructor, the E. I. Jury award for excellent students in the area of systems theory, and the Wolf Scholarship award for excellent research students. For two years he had been a post doctoral fellow at the department of physiology, Northwestern University Medicl School.

Parts of his studies were performed at the Robotics Lab of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Dr. Karniel returned to the Faculty of Electrical Engineering on March 2002 and served as research associate and as the academic supervisor of the Physiological Signal Processing Laboratory. Since October 2003 he is with the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. He established the Computational Motor Control Laboratory to study the brain using computational models as well as human machine interfacing techniques such as tracking systems and augmenter reality with haptics.

Dr. Kariel is the head of the organizing committee of the upcoming first international workshop on Computational Motor Control at the Negev, to be held on May 25, 2005 at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.