Link for Live Seminar

Link for Recorded seminars – 2020/2021 school year

Abstract:

When we think of animal behavior, what typically comes to mind are actions – running, eating, swimming, grooming, flying, singing, resting. Behavior, however, is more than the catalogue of motions that an organism can perform. Animals organize their repertoire of actions into sequences and patterns whose underlying dynamics last much longer than any particular behavior. How an organism modulates these dynamics affects its success at accessing food, reproducing, and myriad other tasks essential for survival. Animals regulate these patterns of behavior via many interacting internal states (hunger, reproductive cycle, age, etc.) that we cannot directly measure. Studying these hidden states’ dynamics, accordingly, has proven challenging due to a lack of measurement techniques and theoretical understanding. In this talk, I will outline our efforts to uncover the latent dynamics that underlie long timescale structure in animal behavior. Looking across a variety of organisms, we use a novel methodology to measure animals’ full behavioral repertoires to find the existence of a non-trivial form of long timescale dynamics that cannot be explained using standard mathematical frameworks. I will present how temporal coarse-graining can be used to understand how these dynamics are generated and how the found course-grained states can be related to the internal states governing behavior through a combination of machine learning techniques and dynamical systems modeling.  Inferring these hidden dynamics presents a new opportunity to generate insights into the neural and physiological mechanisms that animals use to select actions.

Biography:

Gordon J. Berman, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Biology, Emory University Co-Director, Simons-Emory International Consortium on Motor Control Chair of Recruitment for the Emory Neuroscience Graduate Program . Our lab uses theoretical, computational, and data-driven approaches to gain quantitative insight into entire repertoires of animal behaviors, aiming to make connections to the neurobiology, genetics, and evolutionary histories and that underlie them. Get more information here.

Link for Live Seminar

Link for Recorded seminars – 2020/2021 school year

Abstract:

Autonomous systems offer the promise of providing greater safety and access. However, this positive impact will only be achieved if the underlying algorithms that control such systems can be certified to behave robustly. This talk will describe a pair of techniques grounded in infinite dimensional optimization to address this challenge.

The first technique, which is called Reachability-based Trajectory Design, constructs a parameterized representation of the forward reachable set, which it then uses in concert with predictions to enable real-time, certified, collision checking. This approach, which is guaranteed to generate not-at-fault behavior, is demonstrated across a variety of different real-world platforms including ground vehicles, manipulators, and walking robots. The second technique is a modeling method that allows one to represent a nonlinear system as a linear system in the infinite-dimensional space of real-valued functions. By applying this modeling method, one can employ well-understood linear model predictive control techniques to robustly control nonlinear systems. The utility of this approach is verified on a soft robot control task.

Biography:

Ram Vasudevan is an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering and the Robotics Institute at the University of Michigan. He received a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, an MS degree in Electrical Engineering, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering all from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the ONR Young Investigator Award. His work has received best paper awards at the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, the ASME Dynamics Systems and Controls Conference, and IEEE OCEANS Conference and has been finalist for best paper at Robotics: Science and Systems.