MMAE Seminar - A Normative View of Motor Control and Learning

Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. Max Berniker, Assistant Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, to campus on Wednesday, February 4th to present his lecture, "A Normative View of Motor Control and Learning."

Abstract

Our bodies are effectively the world's most complex robotic systems, yet we control their movements and learn new ones with a deceptive ease. How does the brain solve this difficult problem? My work over the last few years has extended previous internal model theories, emphasizing the need for the brain to separately model the body and the world. This body/world framework unifies a body of existing but seemingly contradictory findings, and leads to a compact statistical model with broad predictive power. Moreover, an accurate predictive model of the motor system promises an understanding of how the brain learns to move our body, and ultimately an understanding of how the brain learns in general.

Biography

Dr. Max Berniker holds PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an assistant professor at University of Illinois at Chicago and an adjunct professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Northwestern University. Dr. Berniker is a controls engineer specializing in reverse engineering the central nervous system, focusing on motor control in humans and animals. With a background in controls, system dynamics, biomechanics and neuroscience, he has worked across many modeling domains, from robotics to muscle modeling, and many experimental settings, from robot-assisted rehabilitation to human psychophysics to animal model studies. Overall, his research aims to illuminate the workings of the motor system for the benefit of basic science and for individuals with motor disabilities.