Hey, I'd like to work in this lab with all the robots.
I came to the NACS program and my current lab by a somewhat unusual route. I earned my undergraduate degree in marine biology from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 2000. I graduated with a math minor, and had done undergraduate research on blue crab neurophysiology.
Five labs doing leech physiology wasn't going to cut it :
“Hey, I'd like to work in this lab with all the robots. I know my degree is in marine biology, but I think I can pick up this whole EE thing as I go.” My interests in mathematics and neuroscience led me to search for a graduate program where I could pursue work in computational neuroscience. However, always having had a broad range of interests, I also wanted a diverse program where I would be exposed to different perspectives on neural function. Five labs doing leech physiology wasn't going to cut it. It turned out to be much harder than I expected to find a solid, diverse program in neuroscience, but after a bit of a search it seemed that NACS program at UMD might have what I was after. I went for a visit over spring break, and found everyone at the program to be quite friendly and helpful. I was given tours of several labs in my range of interests, and in one lab in the electrical engineering department they had robots. Being a certified geek, I was pretty much sold at that point. So, I sent in my letter of acceptance to the program, which basically said “Hey, I'd like to work in this lab with all the robots. I know my degree is in marine biology, but I think I can pick up this whole EE thing as I go.” (I have since realized that one of the great things about grad school is that you can make ridiculous assertions such as this, and nobody bats an eye) The response I got was, “Great, we're happy to have you.”
research projects : from vlsi chips to real bats
Most of the research I do falls into the rather broad category of Neuromorphic Engineering. I work in the Computational Sensorimotor Systems Lab, which is part of the Institute for Systems Research. Timothy Horiuchi is my thesis advisor. So, in the fall of 2000, I started my work in the Computational Sensorimotor Systems Lab (CSSL, “Cecil,” for short). I did manage to pick up the EE stuff, and it was quite difficult, but a lot of fun to learn. I have since designed several custom neuromorphic VLSI chips as part of the “microchipoptera” project, which seeks to model bat echolocation in a hardware system. I have worked on several iterations of chips which implement a neural mechanism for range localization, and my latest chip performs localization in the two-dimensional plane defined by azimuth and range. Along the way, I have worked on several other side projects and smaller projects, some of the more interesting of which include creating whisker-like tactile sensors for robots and helping to supervise undergraduate projects implementing obstacle-avoidance algorithms on echolocating mobile robots. Currently I am preparing to do some experiments with actual (not robotic) bats in an attempt to answer some questions that came up while working on some of the chip design projects.
