Emanuel (Emo) Vassilev Todorov (born 1971), a neuroscientist, is an associate professor and director of the Movement Control Laboratory[1] at the University of Washington. He introduced the use of optimal control as a formal explanatory framework for biological movement (see below). He is the principal developer of the MuJoCo physics engine.[2]
Emanuel V. Todorov | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1971 |
| Nationality | Bulgarian |
| Alma mater | West Virginia Wesleyan College B.S. (1993) Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ph.D. (1998) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, |
| Institutions | University of Washington |
| Doctoral advisor | Michael I. Jordan Whitman Richards |
| Website | homes |
Todorov completed his PhD in MIT under the supervision of Michael Jordan and Whitman Richards.[3] He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit[4] at UCL under Peter Dayan and Geoffrey Hinton. He is a recipient of the 2004 Sloan Fellowship in neuroscience.[5]
In 2002 he proposed that stochastic optimal control principles are a good theoretical framework for explaining biological movement.[6] In 2011 this view was acknowledged by one of its critics, Karl Friston, to have become "the dominant paradigm for understanding motor behavior in formal or computational terms."[7] It has been described in the popular scientific press together with other connections between biology and optimisation principles.[8] An editorial comment by Kenji Doya about one of Todorov's articles in PNAS called it "a refreshingly new approach in optimal control based on a novel insight as to the duality of optimal control and statistical inference".[9]
His work on robotic hands has been featured in popular publications on robotics.[10][11][12] In January 2017 he was interviewed for the Robots Podcast.[13]
He is the recipient of 11 National Science Foundation grant awards totalling more than $7.5 million as Principal Investigator.[14]
References
edit- ^ "University of Washington faculty page". washington.edu. University of Washington. 12 June 2009. Retrieved 29 April 2017.
- ^ Todorov, Emanuel; Erez, Tom; Tassa, Yuval (2012). "MuJoCo: A physics engine for model-based control". 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). pp. 5026–5033. doi:10.1109/IROS.2012.6386109. ISBN 978-1-4673-1736-8.
- ^ Studies of Goal-directed Movements (PhD). 1998. hdl:1721.1/9612.
- ^ "Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit". Gatsby.ucl.ac.uk. Retrieved 29 April 2017.
- ^ "List of past Sloan Fellows". sloan.org. Sloan Foundation. Archived from the original on 14 March 2018. Retrieved 29 April 2017.
- ^ Todorov, Emanuel; Jordan, Michael I. (2002). "Optimal feedback control as a theory of motor coordination". Nature Neuroscience. 5 (11): 1226–1235. doi:10.1038/nn963. PMID 12404008. S2CID 205441511.
- ^ Friston, Karl (2011). "What Is Optimal about Motor Control?". Neuron. 72 (3): 488–498. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2011.10.018. PMID 22078508.
- ^ Angier, Natalie (1 November 2010). "Optimization at the Intersection of Biology and Physics". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 May 2017.
- ^ Doya, Kenji (2009). "How can we learn efficiently to act optimally and flexibly?". PNAS. 106 (28): 11429–11430. Bibcode:2009PNAS..10611429D. doi:10.1073/pnas.0905423106. PMC 2710651. PMID 19584249.
- ^ Schmerler, Jessica; Chant, Ian (1 July 2016). "Tomorrow's Prosthetic Hand". Scientific American Mind. Retrieved 6 May 2017.
- ^ "This Is the Most Amazing Biomimetic Anthropomorphic Robot Hand We've Ever Seen". IEEE Spectrum, Evan Ackerman, 18 Feb 2016
- ^ "UW team creates robotic hand that learns to become more dexterous than yours". GeekWire, Alan Boyle, May 9, 2016
- ^ "Robots Podcast : Physics-based Optimization for Robot Control, with Emo Todorov". Irish Tech News, Simon Cocking January 20, 2017.
- ^ "National Science Foundation grants awarded to Emanuel Todorov". nsf.gov. NSF. Retrieved 29 April 2017.