Paul F.M.J. Verschure

paul.verschureupf.edu

Dr. Paul F.M.J. Verschure (1962)

Catalan Institute of Advanced Research (ICREA) research professor, Technology Department, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Paul received both his Ma. and PhD in psychology. His scientific aim is to find a unified theory of mind, brain and body through the use of synthetic methods and to apply such a theory to the development of novel cognitive technologies.

Paul has pursued his research at different institutes in the US (Neurosciences Institute and The Salk Institute, both in San Diego) and Europe (University of Amsterdam, University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-ETH and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona).

Paul works on biologically constrained models of perception, learning, behavior and problem solving that are applied to wheeled and flying robots, interactive spaces and avatars. The results of these projects have been published in leading scientific journals including Nature, Science, PLoS and PNAS. In addition to his basic research, he applies concepts and methods from the study of natural perception, cognition and behavior to the development of interactive creative installations and intelligent immersive spaces. Since 1998, he has, together with his collaborators, generated a series 20 public exhibits of which the most ambitious was the exhibit "Ada: Intelligent space" for the Swiss national exhibition Expo.02, that was visited by 560000 people. The most recent one was the Multimodal Brain Orchestra that premiered in the closing ceremony of the EC Future and Emerging technologies conference in Prague in April 2009.

Paul's ideas he is most pleased with:

- Distributed Adaptive Control: An architecture of perception, cognition and behavior

- Predictive Hebbian Learning

- Temporal Population Code - TPC

- Self-stabilizing negative feedback learning system of the cerebellum

- Rehabilitation Gaming Station - RGS

- RoBoser

Paul leads SPECS, a multidisciplinary group of 25 pre-doctoral, doctoral and post-doctoral researchers that include physicists, psychologists, biologists, engineers and computer scientists.

Paul’s spare time is spend with his family and training for another Ironman triathlon.