Author: Philipp Wicke

Lecturer: Gabriela Markova
Fields: developmental psychology, social cognition, music

Content

The goal of this lecture series is to explore whether and how social engagements with others play a directional role for the emergence of cognitive phenomena. Taking a developmental perspective, I will present evidence from research on interpersonal synchrony, music, and play, and highlight novel methodological approaches to study cognition in a natural context. I will argue that by understanding the developmental and neurobiological complexities of social engagements with others will give us an exclusive insight into the making of children’s understanding of the world.

Literature

• D’Ausilio, A., Novembre, G., Fadiga, L., & Keller, P. E. (2015). What can music tell us about social interaction? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19, 111-114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.01.005
• De Jaegher, H., Di Paolo, E., & Gallagher, S. (2010). Can social interaction constitute social cognition? Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 441-447. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.06.009
• Hoehl, S., & Markova, G. (2018). Moving developmental social neuroscience toward a second-person approach. PLoS Biology, 16(12), e3000055. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000055
• Lillard, A. S. (2017). Why do children (pretend) play? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 826-834. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.08.001
• Markova, G., Nguyen, T., & Hoehl, S. (2019). Neurobehavioral interpersonal synchrony in early development: The role of interactional rhythms. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2078. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02078
• Mayo, O., & Gordon, I. (2020). In and out of synchrony – Behavioral and physiological dynamics of dyadic interpersonal coordination. Psychophysiology, 57(6), e13574. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13574
• Novembre, G., & Iannetti, G. D. (2021). Hyperscanning alone cannot prove causality. Multi-brain stimulation can. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25, 96-99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.11.003
• Reddy, V. (2008). How infants know minds. Harvard University Press.
• Trehub, S. E. (2018). The musical infant. In D. J. Lewkowicz & R. Lickliter (Eds.),
• Conceptions of development: Lessons from the laboratory (pp. 231-257). Psychology Press.

Lecturer

Gabriela Markova, Ph.D., is a researcher at the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology at University of Vienna. Dr. Markova holds a Ph.D. in psychology from York University, Toronto, Canada, and a Mag. from University of Salzburg. In her research she investigates early socio-emotional and -cognitive development applying various methods, including behavioural and endocrinological analyses, EEG and eye tracking. Dr. Markova is particularly interested in the meaning, structures and functions of early social interactive processes as well as the clinical relevance of social cognition. She has also served as head of research of Red Noses International, where she initiated research activities focused on the effectiveness of healthcare clown interventions.

Affiliation: University of Vienna
Homepage: https://entw-psy.univie.ac.at/en/about-us/our-team/gabriela-markova/

Lecturer: Terry Stewart
Fields: Computational Neuroscience / Neuromorphic Computing

Content

While the brain does perform some sort of computation to produce cognition, it is clear that this sort of computation is wildly different from traditional computers, and indeed also wildly different from traditional machine learning neural networks. In this course, we identify the type of computation that biological neurons are good at (in particular, dynamical systems), and show how to build large-scale neural models that compute basic aspects of cognition (sensorimotor, memory, symbolic reasoning, action selection, learning, etc.). These models can either be made to be biologically realistic (to varying levels of detail) or mapped onto energy-efficient neuromorphic hardware.

Literature

• Eliasmith, C. and Anderson, C. (2003). Neural engineering: Computation, representation, and dynamics in neurobiological systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Eliasmith, C. et al., (2012). A large-scale model of the functioning brain. Science, 338:1202-1205.
• Kajić, I. et al., (2017). A spiking neuron model of word associations for the remote associates test. Frontiers in Psychology, 8:99.
• Stöckel, A. et al., (2021). Connecting biological detail with neural computation: application to the cerebellar granule-golgi microcircuit. Topics in Cognitive Science, 13(3):515-533.

Lecturer

Terry Stewart is a Senior Research Officer at the National Research Council Canada, after receiving his PhD in Cognitive Science at Carleton University and ten years as a post-doc in the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. His research is on how neural systems compute, involving both building large-scale neural simulations of cognitive behaviour and the implementation of these model in energy-efficient neuromorphic hardware.

Affiliation: National Research Council Canada
Homepage: http://terrystewart.ca

Lecturer: Stefan Scherbaum and Martin Schoemann
Fields: Psychology, Neuroscience, Cognitive Modeling

Content

For a long time, psychology and neuroscience has used outcome measures (usually key-presses) to study what people do, e.g., which options people choose under which circumstances. The cognitive processes behind these outcomes were either inferred by theoretical connections or by fitting simple models to data. This approach matched with static or stage-like cognitive and decision models. However, our view on cognitive processes has become more and more dynamic and hence, the experimental focus has shifted in recent years to measure the dynamics of cognitive processes more directly, e.g., via eye-tracking, modern EEG-based approaches, and motion tracking. The latter approach is based on the assumption that the dynamics of cognitive processes can leak into continuously traced behavior. A simple and cheap version of this approach that is available to practically everyone is to track participants’ mouse cursor movement while they are making decisions between options (e.g., moral options, monetary options, stimulus categories) on a computer screen.
This course provides a theoretical introduction to mouse cursor tracking and offers hands-on experience in building mouse tracking experiments and analyzing the resulting data. In the theoretical parts, we will look at insights from typical mouse tracking studies, what needs to be considered when building such a study, how the resulting continuous data can be analyzed and constrain models of cognitive processes. In the practical parts, you will design and implement mouse tracking experiments in small groups, measure each other and analyze the resulting data. The course will provide a basic framework in Matlab for the experiments and analysis of data (other programming languages can be used when you are proficient, e.g., R, Python, JavaScript, C#, etc.). Basic programming skills will be required, but work in groups will allow you to combine your skills and get insights what your movement dynamics tell you about your cognition.

Literature

• Schoemann, M., O’Hora, D., Dale, R., & Scherbaum, S. (2021). Using mouse cursor tracking to investigate online cognition: Preserving methodological ingenuity while moving toward reproducible science. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28(3), 766–787. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01851-3
• Scherbaum, S., & Dshemuchadse, M. (2020). Psychometrics of the continuous mind: Measuring cognitive sub-processes via mouse tracking. Memory & Cognition, 48(3), 436–454. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-019-00981-x
• Freeman, J. B. (2018). Doing Psychological Science by Hand. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27, 315–323. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417746793
• Wulff, D. U., Kieslich, P. J., Henninger, F., Haslbeck, J. M. B., & Schulte-Mecklenbeck, M. (2021, December 23). Movement tracking of cognitive processes: A tutorial using mousetrap. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/v685r

Lecturer

Stefan Scherbaum works as a Professor of psychological research methods and cognitive modelling at TU Dresden. Much of his work focuses on measuring and modelling the dynamics of cognitive and social interaction processes. Martin Schoemann is a predoctoral researcher in Stefan’s lab at TU Dresden. He works at the intersection of research methods, cognitive modelling, and decision sciences where he focuses on measuring and modelling the dynamics of decision-making processes.

Affiliation: Technische Universität Dresden
Homepage: https://tu-dresden.de/mn/psychologie/ifap/methpsy/die-professur/index

Lecturer: Cosima Prahm
Fields: Medicine/Neuroscience/Machine Learning

Content

Although the hand represents only 1% of our body weight, most of our sensorimotor cortex is associated with its control. The loss of a hand therefore not only signifies the loss of the most important tool with which we can interact with our environment, but also leaves us with a drastic sensory-motor deficit that challenges our central nervous system. Restoring hand function is therefore not only an essential part of restoring physical integrity and functional employability, but also closes the neural circuit, thereby reducing phantom sensations and nerve pain.

When there is no longer sufficient anatomy to restore meaningful function, we can resort to complex robotic replacements whose functional capabilities in some respects even surpass biological alternatives, such as conservative reconstructive measures or transplantation of a hand. However, as with replantation and transplantation, the challenge with bionic robotic replacements is to solidly attach it the skeleton and connect the prosthesis to our neural and muscular system to achieve natural, intuitive control and also provide basic sensory feedback.

This interdisciplinary course will discuss the progressive development of upper extremity robotic prosthetics in the fields of bioengineering, medicine, computer science, and neuroscience. We address the medical basis of biosignals, movement, amputation and restoration, and various systems of prosthetic limbs to restore physical integrity. We will discuss enhancement versus restoration and how to improve the man-machine-interface, exemplified with case studies.

Literature

• Aszmann, O. C., & Farina, D. (2021). Bionic Limb Reconstruction. In O. C. Aszmann & D. Farina (Eds.), Bionic Limb Reconstruction (1st ed.). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60746-3
• Prahm, C., Daigeler, A., & Kolbenschlag, J. (2021). Bionische Rekonstruktion der oberen Extremität. In Plastische Chirurgie (3rd ed., pp. 135–145). Kaden.
• Bressler, M., Merk, J., Heinzel, J., Butz, M. V., Daigeler, A., Kolbenschlag, J., & Prahm, C. (2022). Visualizing the Unseen: Illustrating and Documenting Phantom Limb Sensations and Phantom Limb Pain With C.A.L.A. Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences, 3(February), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fresc.2022.806114
• Prahm, C., Schulz, A., Paaben, B., Schoisswohl, J., Kaniusas, E., Dorffner, G., Hammer, B., & Aszmann, O. (2019). Counteracting Electrode Shifts in Upper-Limb Prosthesis Control via Transfer Learning. IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 27(5), 956–962. https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSRE.2019.2907200

Lecturer

Cosima Prahm received her PhD in Medicine – Clinical Neuroscience at the Clinical Laboratory for Bionic Extremity Reconstruction at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. Since 2019 she is heading the Research Laboratory for Advanced Reconstruction, Regeneration and Rehabilitation of Extremities at the department for Hand, Plastic, Reconstructive and Burn Surgery at the University Clinic of Tuebingen/BG Hospital, Germany. Her research focus includes the improvement of human machine interfaces for upper extremity amputees, nerve regeneration, organ on a chip and virtual rehabilitation in XR environments.

Affiliation: BG Hospital, University Clinic of Tuebingen, Department for Hand, Plastic, Reconstructive and Burn Surgery
Homepage: https://www.bg-kliniken.de/klinik-tuebingen/fachbereiche/detail/rekonstruktive-chirurgie/

Lecturer: Daniel Sabinasz, Raul Grieben, Gregor Schöner
Fields: Cognitive Science, Neural modeling

Content

YOU WILL NEED TO BRING YOUR OWN COMPUTER FOR THIS COURSE!

Dynamic Field Theory (DFT) provides a mathematical framework in which the emergence of cognition from its sensorimotor grounding can be understood. The activation dynamics of neural populations are organized as strongly recurrent neural networks that stabilize neural representations. Instabilities generate state transitions from which sequences of mental and motor acts emerge.
The tutorial will introduce the core concepts of DFT, while providing hands-on exercises and projects that make use of these concepts to build models of grounded cognition. We will discuss how DFT relates to other approaches to cognition.

Literature

• Schöner, G.: Dynamical Systems Approaches to Cognition. In: Sun, R (ed.): The Cambridge Handbook of Computational Psychology. 2nd Edition. Cambridge University Press (in press).
• (We will make a pre-print available).
• See dynamicfieldtheory.org for more resources

Lecturer

Daniel Sabinasz is a Doctoral Student at the Institute for Neural Computation (INI) at the Ruhr-University Bochum focussed on using DFT to account for higher cognition. His training is in computer science and cognitive science.

Raul Grieben is a Doctoral Student at the INI focussed on a neural dynamic account for visual search. His training is in applied computer science.

Gregor Schöner holds the chair for Theory of Cognitive Systems at the INI. His broad interdisciplinary profile touches movement science, visual psychophysics, cognitive science, neuroscience, and cognitive robotics. .He has held academic positions in the US, France, and Germany, has been funded through German, French, European, and US funding agencies, and has published over 270 scientific articles.

Affiliation: Ruhr-University Bochum
Homepage: https://www.ini.rub.de/

Lecturer: Claudia Muth
Fields: Cognitive Science, Design, Art, Psychology

Content

Embodied and enactive approaches in cognitive science emphasize that perception and cognition are strongly connected to the body, its motion, organization, precariousness and needs. Here, action is no consequence of representing and processing an input. Instead, it is part of sensorimotor patterns and can even embody knowledge, as when we move our fingers to count. Both cognition and action are deeply embedded in a *designed* environment – they are interwoven with material as well as social structures: e.g., tools limit or expand our reach, strength and precision, clothing enables or restricts postures and architecture shapes movement, orientation and perspective but also social encounters and hierarchies. However, such affordances are never preset: Sense-making and behavior can be said to emerge dynamically out of the individual and culturally scaffolded entanglement between mind, body and material. In this course, we explore the role of design for cognition, the materiality of creative processes and the destabilizing potential of art.

The Design of Sense-Making: Materials as Co-Creators

When we interact with or transform materials and things in order to get something into view, create form or reach a goal, we use the world as a resource (Clark, 2016). Meanwhile, it seems that we not only externalize cognitive processes by that. Material encounters might be linked with cognition more fundamentally: A notebook is not only part of one’s memory as it stores contents, but part of a memory process that is different from remembering without a notebook (flipping pages, reading, recognizing marks…) – Material-Engagement-Theory suggests that materials and things even co-determine cognitive and creative processes (Malafouris, 2013). We might thus say that the “design” of things, spaces and situations provides a structure that is deeply intertwined with action and cognition. And “to design” refers to a process of transformation that might be thoroughly grounded in material qualities.

The Art of Sense-Making: The Pleasure of Instability

When engaging with art, we might sometimes even become aware of our own habits of active sense making: artistic means of disruption can be “Strange Tools” (Nöe, 2015) by which we investigate ourselves. When experiencing multistability, ambivalence, uncertainty or indeterminacy, instabilities in sense-making might furthermore cause specific affective dynamics beyond the pleasure of familiarity (Muth & Carbon, 2022; Muth, Hesslinger & Carbon, 2018). In these cases, we might rather be driven by the open-ended activity of sense-making itself than by the resolution of ambiguity.

This course

In this course we will discuss theoretical accounts of the relationship between mind, body and material as well as the crucial role of design in shaping this entanglement. We will actively explore the role of materials for creative processes and the potential of art to provide experiential access to our own active sense-making.

Literature

• Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty — Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Malafouris, L. (2013). How things shape the mind. A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press.
• Muth, C. & Carbon, C. C. (2022). Ambivalence of artistic photographs stimulates interest and the mo-tivation to engage. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/aca0000448
• Muth, C., Hesslinger, V. M., & Carbon, C. C. (2018). Variants of semantic instability (SeIns) in the arts: A classification study based on experiential reports. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 12(1), 11-23. doi: 10.1037/aca0000113
• Nöe, A. (2015). Strange tools: Art and human nature. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Lecturer

Claudia Muth is a cognitive scientist and perception researcher with a background in fine arts and design. She worked as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Bamberg and for a hands-on museum on perception based in Nuremberg. Her main interest concerns the experience of disordered, ambiguous or indeterminate situations, artistic research as well as enactive approaches to design. Currently, she holds a substitute professorship for “Psychology of Design” at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle.

Affiliation: Psychology of Design, Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle, Germany
Homepage: https://www.uni-bamberg.de/allgpsych/alumni/claudia-muth/

Lecturer: Prof. John Spencer
Fields: psychology, cognitive science, developmental science, neuroscience

Content

I will present a line of work exploring the neural dynamics underlying visual working memory — a core cognitive system used to detect changes in the world, keeping cognition anchored to the visual surrounds. I will first introduce the key concepts of Dynamic Field Theory. Next, I will present our theory of visual working memory. Subsequent lectures will show how we have tested and extended this theory in the areas of adult cognition and human development, including how we have embedded the theory in larger cognitive architectures. I will also discuss how we have tested the neural dynamic details of the theory using fMRI.

Literature

• Buss, A.T., Magnotta, V., Penny, W., Schöner, G., Huppert, T. & Spencer, J.P. (2021). How do neural processes give rise to cognition? Simultaneously predicting brain and behavior with a dynamic model of visual working memory. Psychological Review, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rev0000264.
• Spencer, J. P. (2020). The development of working memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, doi/10.1177/0963721420959835.
• Delgado Reyes, L.M., Wijeakumar, S., Magnotta, V.A., Forbes, S.H. & Spencer, J.P. (2020). The functional brain networks that underlie visual working memory in the first two years of life. NeuroImage, 219, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116971.
• Perone, S. & Spencer, J.P. (2013). Autonomous visual exploration creates developmental change in familiarity and novelty seeking behaviors. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, Article 648.
• Perone, S. & Spencer, J.P. (2013). Autonomy in action: Linking the act of looking to memory formation in infancy via dynamic neural fields. Cognitive Science, 37, 1-60.
• Perone, S., Simmering, V.R. & Spencer, J.P. (2011). Stronger neural dynamics capture changes in infants’ visual short-term memory capacity over development. Developmental Science, 14, 1379-1392.
• Johnson, J.S., Spencer, J.P., & Schöner, G. (2009). A layered neural architecture for the consolidation, maintenance, and updating of representations in visual working memory. Brain Research, 1299, 17-32.
• Johnson, J.S., Spencer, J.P., Luck, S.J., & Schöner, G. (2009). A dynamic neural field model of visual working memory and change detection. Psychological Science, 20, 568-577.

Lecturer

John P. Spencer is a Professor of Psychology at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. Prior to arriving in the UK, he was a Professor of Psychology at the University of Iowa and served as the founding Director of the Delta Center (Development and Learning from Theory to Application). He received a Sc.B. with Honors from Brown University in 1991 and a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Indiana University in 1998. He is the recipient of the Irving J. Saltzman and the J.R. Kantor Graduate Awards from Indiana University, the 2003 Early Research Contributions Award from the Society for Research in Child Development, and the 2006 Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award from the American Psychological Foundation. His research examines the development of visuo-spatial cognition, word learning, working memory, attention, and executive function with an emphasis on dynamical systems and dynamic field models of cognition and action. He has had continuous funding from the US National Institutes of Health and the US National Science Foundation since 2001 and has been a fellow of the American Psychological Association since 2007. He is currently leading a new initiative on infant brain health in India funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Affiliation: University of East Anglia
Homepage: https://ddlabs.uea.ac.uk/

Lecturer: Sven Walter
Fields: Philosophy

UNFORTUNATELY, BC4 HAD TO BE CANCELLED.

Content

The four lectures will cover the changes that the concept of cognition seems to have undergone since the 1960, starting with the computer model of the mind, then covering connectionism and dynamicism and finally discussing modern approaches that have been suggested under such headings as embodiment, enactivism, extended mind etc.

Lecturer

Sven Walter studied philosophy at Bonn and Ohio State University. He received his PhD in 2005, since 2007 he is professor for philosophy of mind and cognition.

Affiliation: Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University

Lecturer: Gottfried Vosgerau
Fields: Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Cognition

Content

Although Cognitive Science started as an interdisciplinary approach to the mind based on the concept of mental representations, mental representations are much debated in the current literature. In this course, we will first look at arguments why mental representations are still necessary for truly causal explanations of behavior. We will also discuss what mental representations are not and which shortcomings of classical definitions should be abandoned. One critical issue concerns the question of how mental representations come into place and how they acquire their content. We will discuss ideas that propose specific transitions from action control to simple mental representations to concepts.

Literature

• Egan, F. (2020): “A Deflationary Account of Mental Representation”, in J. Smortchkova, K. Dołęga, and T. Schlicht (eds.): What are Mental Representations?, Oxford University Press, 26–54.
• Gentsch, A.; Weber, A.; Synofzik, M.; Vosgerau, G. & Schütz-Bosbach, S. (2016): „Towards a common framework of grounded action cognition: Relating motor control perception and cognition“, Cognition 146, 81-89.
• Newen, A. & Vosgerau, G. (2020): “Situated Mental Representations: Why we need mental representations and how we should understand them”, in J. Smortchkova, K. Dołęga, and T. Schlicht (eds.): What are Mental Representations?, Oxford University Press, 178–212.
• Ramsey, W. M. 2017. Must Cognition Be Representational? Synthese 194 (11): 4197–4214.
• Vosgerau, G., Seuchter, T., Petersen, W., (2015), “Analyzing Concepts in Action-Frames”, in: T. Gamerschlag, R. Osswald, W. Petersen (eds.): Meaning, Frames, and Conceptual Representation, Studies in Language and Cognition. Düsseldorf University Press, Düsseldorf; S.293-310.
• Weber, A. & Vosgerau, G. (2012), „Grounding Action Representations“, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3, 53-69.

Lecturer

Prof. Dr. Gottfried Vosgerau received his PhD in Philosophy in 2007 with a dissertation on mental representation. He is professor for Philosophy of Mind and Cognition at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf since 2019. His main research interests include mental representations, other mental entities and their role in the explanation of behavior, the relation between thought and language, and the philosophical implications of mental disorders.

Affiliation: Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
Homepage: https://www.philosophie.hhu.de/personal/philosophie-vi-philosophie-des-geistes-und-der-kognition

Lecturer: Auke J. Ijspeert
Fields: Robotics, Computational neuroscience

Content

The ability to efficiently move in complex environments is a fundamental property both for animals and for robots, and the problem of locomotion and movement control is an area in which neuroscience, biomechanics, and robotics can fruitfully interact. In this talk, I will present how biorobots and numerical models can be used to explore the interplay of the four main components underlying animal locomotion, namely central pattern generators (CPGs), reflexes, descending modulation, and the musculoskeletal system. Going from lamprey to human locomotion, I will present a series of models that tend to show that the respective roles of these components have changed during evolution with a dominant role of CPGs in lamprey and salamander locomotion, and a more important role for sensory feedback and descending modulation in human locomotion. Furthermore, the models suggest that there is an interesting redundancy between sensory feedback loops and CPGs that provide strong robustness against neural lesions. If time allows, I will also present a project showing how robotics can provide scientific tools for paleontology.

Literature

• Ijspeert, A. J. (2014). Biorobotics: Using robots to emulate and investigate agile locomotion. Science, 346(6206), 196–203. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1254486
• Ryczko, D., Simon, A., & Ijspeert, A. J. (2020). Walking with Salamanders: From Molecules to Biorobotics. Trends in Neurosciences, 43(11), 916–930. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2020.08.006
• Thandiackal, R., Melo, K., Paez, L., Herault, J., Kano, T., Akiyama, K., Boyer, F., Ryczko, D., Ishiguro, A., & Ijspeert, A. J. (2021). Emergence of robust self-organized undulatory swimming based on local hydrodynamic force sensing. Science Robotics, 6(57), eabf6354. https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abf6354

Lecturer

Auke Ijspeert is a professor at EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland), IEEE Fellow, and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory (https://www.epfl.ch/labs/biorob). He has a B.Sc./M.Sc. in physics from the EPFL (1995), and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1999). His research interests are at the intersection between robotics and computational neuroscience. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to gain a better understanding of animal locomotion and movement control, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and locomotion controllers (see for instance Ijspeert et al, Science, Vol. 315, 2007 and Ijspeert, Science Vol. 346, 2014). He is also interested in assisting persons with limited mobility using exoskeletons and assistive furniture. With his colleagues, he has received paper awards at ICRA2002, CLAWAR2005, IEEE Humanoids 2007, IEEE ROMAN 2014, CLAWAR 2015, and CLAWAR 2019. He is associate editor for the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics and the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics. He is also a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine.

Affiliation: EPFL
Homepage: https://www.epfl.ch/labs/biorob/people/ijspeert/