Giovedì 28 luglio
h. 14.30
Sala Riunioni Centro Piaggio
IVAN HERREROS
Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems group
Department of Information and Communication Technologies,
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona
http://specs.upf.edu/people/ivan-herreros
A minimal model of cerebellar anticipatory control
ABSTRACT
The cerebellum can supplement reactive reflexes with adaptive and anticipatory ones, as demonstrated in classical conditioning experiments. However, the implications of the acquisition of this type of anticipatory actions have not been addressed from a control theory perspective. In this talk I will discuss what performance can achieve a minimal model of adaptive anticipatory control, and how the nature of the signals anticipated affects performance. That is, what is the difference between anticipating sensory stimuli or motor commands? To this end, I will formalize the minimal architecture for anticipatory control as a discrete-time linear dynamical system. With this formalization, I will first show that the adaptive controller can acquire errorless reference tracking on a trial-by-trial basis and, second, that there is a basic equivalence between the sensory and motor anticipation strategies. Next, I will discuss under which circumstances the two approaches differ and why the architecture based on sensory anticipation outperforms the one based on motor anticipation. Finally, I will demonstrate the applicability of the general approach and the difference between the two control strategies in a series of experiments with self-balancing robots.
BIO
Ivan Herreros Alonso (Madrid, 1975) obtained his degree in Computer Engineering both from the UPC (Technical University of Catalonia) at Barcelona and the Istituto Politecnico di Torino. His Degree Thesis, carried on during a stage at the Istituto di Linguistica computazional at Pisa was entitled "Self-Organising Map for Realistic Linguistic Data".
Before getting back to research Ivan worked two years as Interaction Designer for one of the most renowned graphic design studios in Spain, where he produced interactive pieces for the Fundació La Caixa, Sonar festival, etc..
Back to scientific research, in 2005 he completed a six months research period in CNR at Pisa and afterwards joined the doctoral program of the Technology Department of the UPF.
After being part for two years at the Natural Language Processing Group, since November 2007 he is at SPECS group. He is actual working in the modeling of different areas of the brain as the Auditory Cortex, Cerebellum, with the purpose of building a complete model accounting for the Two Phase theory of Classical Conditioning.
As a part of his Doctoral scholarship, for the last three years Ivan has been teaching assistant for the Computational Linguistics undergraduate course.