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SUMMARY:Faculty Seminar Alexander Mathis : Integrating Body and Brain: Com
 putational Approaches for Proprioception and Motor Control
DTSTART:20251105T121500
DTEND:20251105T131500
DTSTAMP:20260406T214549Z
UID:4c55b045ef4d3c58f5aa9c16dae730f97e6c8cbeaedc5b28955fc075
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Alexander Mathis\nAbsract\nUnderstanding how the brain c
 ontrols movement represents one of neuroscience's grand challenges. Centra
 l to this challenge is proprioception\, which proves crucial for bodily pe
 rception and motor control\, despite remaining poorly understood. Specific
 ally\, how the nervous system integrates information from numerous distrib
 uted receptors throughout the body remains an open question. We leveraged 
 the principle that body and brain evolved as an integrated system to devel
 op an approach for reverse-engineering proprioception. We expressed compet
 ing hypotheses of the proprioceptive system as quantifiable computational 
 tasks. We found that neural networks optimized to perform these computatio
 nal tasks develop representations that generalize to predict neural dynami
 cs in the brain. Validating this approach further\, these models reproduce
 d classic proprioceptive illusions without any explicit training on illusi
 on data. Motor control presents another core body-brain integration challe
 nge: how does the nervous system coordinate hundreds of muscles and joints
  for skilled behavior? To understand motor control\, we leveraged emerging
  fast simulators and took inspiration from the theory of motor learning to
  develop policies capable of controlling high-dimensional\, nonlinear biom
 echanical models for skilled tasks. Analyzing these models revealed human-
 like low-dimensional control spaces and insights into principles of sensor
 imotor control.\n\nBio\nAlexander Mathis is an Assistant Professor at EPFL
  whose research group works at the intersection of computational neuroscie
 nce and machine learning. His work focuses on quantifying behavior and inv
 estigating how the brain generates movement\, while developing accessible 
 open-source software tools such as DeepLabCut. He completed his doctorate 
 at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU) in 2012 after studying pure m
 athematics. He subsequently held postdoctoral positions at Harvard Univers
 ity and the University of Tübingen (as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoct
 oral Fellow). With his students\, he won consecutive MyoChallenges at Neur
 IPS (2022 and 2023). His work has been recognized with awards\, including 
 the 2024 Robert Bing Prize\, the 2023 Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Pr
 ize\, and the 2023 Frontiers of Science Award. He is a member of the newly
  formed Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience (SCENE)\, which in
 vestigates how environmental affordances shape neural representations.\n\n
 This seminar is part of the evaluation of Prof. Alexander Mathis for the p
 romotion to Associate Professor.\n 
LOCATION:SV 1717 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==SV%201717 https://epfl.zoom.u
 s/j/61526698382
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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