PROFESSOR EHUD AHISSAR

The ScienceDaily article Robot Rat To Lead The Way In Touch Technology said

A new initiative, bringing together nine research groups from seven countries, including teams of robotics and brain researchers from Europe, the USA and Israel, has recently been set up with the aim of imitating nature.

Based on principles of active sensing adopted widely in the animal kingdom, the multinational team is developing innovative touch technologies, including a 'whiskered' robotic rat. The whiskered robot will be able to quickly locate, identify and capture moving objects. 'The use of touch in the design of artificial intelligence systems has been largely overlooked, until now,' says Professor Ehud Ahissar of the Weizmann Institute of Science's Neurobiology Department, whose research team is one of the groups participating in the multinational project.

Ahissar said, 'The aim of this research is to help gain a better understanding of the brain on the one hand, and advance technology on the other. That is to say, researchers can use robots as an experimental tool, by building a brain-like system, step-by-step, gaining insights into the workings of the brain's inside components. With regard to technological applications, we suggest that it is the multiple closed feedback loops that are the key features giving biological systems an advantage over robotic systems. Therefore, implementing this biological knowledge will hopefully allow robotics researchers to build machines that are more efficient, which can be used in rescue missions, as well as search missions under conditions of restricted visibility'. In this way, basic research conducted on animals can contribute to the well-being of humans, other than for medicinal purposes.

Ehud Ahissar, Ph.D. is Associate Professor, Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science and Principal Investigator for the Laboratory for the Study of Adaptive Perceptual Processing.

With the long-term goal of understanding neural mechanisms that underlie adaptive perceptual processing, his Laboratory for the Study of Adaptive Perceptual Processing focuses on the tactile system of the rat. Rats, like some other rodents, possess a specific system for active touch that uses the long facial whiskers (vibrissae) to gather information about the immediate environment. The main effort of his laboratory is aimed at deciphering the neuronal mechanisms that underlie vibrissal touch. Additional efforts in his laboratory are dedicated to studying active touch and active vision in humans. The latter are guided by detailed neuronal knowledge accumulated in the rat, with the eventual goal of developing efficient tactile substitutions for the blind. Learn more about his current and past research!

Ehud authored Temporal-Code to Rate-Code Conversion by Neuronal Phase-Locked Loops, and coauthored Layer-Specific Touch-Dependent Facilitation and Depression in the Somatosensory Cortex during Active Whisking, Haptic object localization in the vibrissal system: behavior and performance, Coding of stimulus frequency by latency in thalamic networks through the interplay of GABAB-mediated feedback and stimulus shape, Speech comprehension is correlated with temporal response patterns recorded from auditory cortex, A neuronal analogue of state-dependent learning, and Hebbian-like functional plasticity in the auditory cortex of the behaving monkey. Read the full list of his publications!

Ehud earned his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University in 1978. He earned his Ph.D. in Neurophysiology from The Hebrew University — Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem in 1991 with the thesis "Examination of models for learning in behaving monkey's cortex". He did his Postdoctoral Fellowship in Neurophysiology, at the Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel from 1991 to 1992. He holds U.S. patent Neuronal phase-locked loops.

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