UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
		COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

			     presents

         "Morphological Neuron Models as Robot Controllers"

                       Dr. Ben Torben-Nielsen
        (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan) 

                     31 March 2010  (Wednesday)
                        Lecture Theatre A166 
		   Hatfield, College Lane Campus
			      3 - 4 pm


		   Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                   Refreshments will be available



Abstract:

Inspiration for robot controllers has long taken from the animal brain because 
of the brain's robustness and adaptivity. A clear trend in the development of 
robot controllers was that every new generation model neuron contained more 
biological detail. However, with the advent of probabilistic techniques, this 
trend stagnated and now statistical models are common as robot controller. 
In this presentation, I will start by showing some amazing features of single 
neuron processing in the animal world and will reveal how nature supports 
these behavioral features. Afterwards, I will investigate whether more 
biological detail (neuronal morphology) can be added to current model neurons 
in order to yield good robot controllers. Preliminary experiments indicate 
that these `morphological models' can perform simple tasks such as motion 
detection robustly.


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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://homepages.stca.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq