IBM Israel Research Seminars

In a thought provocative essay presented in Nature, Yadin Dudai and Mary Carruthers suggested that unlike artificial memory, the human memory is better equipped to handle the future than the past. We wish to explore this issue in the motor control arena. It was suggested that the motor system contains memory modules called forward models which are used in order to predict the future consequences of motor commands. However the distinction between handling the past and the future was not yet studied. For example consider a subject experiencing a series of increasing forces in which the next force is expected to be larger than the previously experienced forces. Motor memory representing the past would never represent a force larger than the previously experienced force. In this talk I'll present some recent studies in my computational motor control laboratory about adaptation to series of force fields, haptics in teleoperation, and lack of predictive control in children with cerebral palsy, along with past studies related to time representation and try to use this information in order to predict the future of computational motor control research. I'll close the talk by proposing a Turing like handshake test for motor intelligence.

This study is supported by the National Institute for Psychobiology in Israel

About the Speaker
Amir Karniel was born in Jerusalem, Israel in 1967. He received the B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. During his undergraduate studies he worked at Intel Corporation, Haifa, Israel. Dr. Karniel received 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 Medical School and the Robotics Laboratory of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Since 2003, he is with the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev where he established the computational motor control laboratory and the organized the annual international computational motor control workshop. During the last three years he won a young scientist BSF grant, promoted to senior lecturer at BGU and to senior member of the IEEE and obtained grants from the National Institute of Psychobiology in Israel and from the Ministry of Science. His research interests include Brain Theory, Motor Control and Motor Learning.