Vikash Glija (UCSD) - Connecting auditory and motor systems
Date:
Fri, 11/04/2022 - 10:30am - 12:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Seminar Room
Event Type:
Hearing Seminar 
At this week’s CCRMA Hearing Seminar Prof. Vikash Gilja (UCSD) will be talking about neural prothesis, building a brain-computer interface to control a bird’s voice. I met Vikash earlier this year and was impressed with his energy, knowledge and scientific curiosity. His work with the motor system and with neural BCI are both amazing. Groups such as Neuralink have suggested that we can use electrodes implanted in the brain to directly control the outside world. This is important both to understand how the brain and motor systems work, and to help people who have lost control of parts of their body.
In my relative youth, I thought we could study the auditory system and ignore the motor system. I’m not ready to go (back) to the motor theory of auditory perception, where all auditory percepts were represented in the brain as their motor commands. But there is a very tight linkage between the audltory system and the motor system, and thus the motivation for this coming Hearing Seminar.
Who: Vikash Gilja (UCSD)
What: Avian Model for the Development of Neural Activity Driven Vocalization Prostheses
When: Friday November 4, 2022 at 10:30AM
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room (top floor of the Knoll)
Why: We don’t understand something until we can control it
Come to CCRMA to learn more about how we might use electrodes in our brains to replace missing functionality.
Masks are encouraged, but not required, especially since we meet around a table to promote discussion.
- Malcolm
P.S. At last week’s seminar we talked a bit about pitch. Mark Liberman just sent me this wonderful demo of overtone singing showing that pitch and formants are different beasts. Well worth a few minutes of your time to see and hear
Wow.
Title: Avian Model for the Development of Neural Activity Driven Vocalization Prostheses
Prof. Vikash Gilja (UCSD)
Prof. Vikash Gilja (UCSD)
Abstract: Neural prostheses hold the promise of restoring lost function for individuals with motor, speech, and language deficits due to injury and neurodegenerative disease, and to advance our understanding of how the brain controls complex behavior. Although limb-based motor prostheses are actively studied and have yielded increasingly high performance, speech, language, and communications prosthesis development, while promising, is more limited. We aim to accelerate speech and communications prosthesis development with an avian model that complements ongoing human studies.
A central aspect of this work is the collection and curation of large-scale datasets that include continuous measurement of vocalization behavior across hours and days along with simultaneous neural activity from 100s of neurons from multiple brain regions, together with information on behavior-defining context manipulations. These data enable development and validation of machine learning models that map neural activity to behavior. As a complement to data acquired in human studies, our avian studies facilitate continuous data collection across multiple brain regions in highly controlled settings for larger cohorts of subjects. Thus, data from our studies can enable rapid prototyping of novel neural prosthetic system designs and can be applied to examine the potential for existing designs to generalize across subjects and behavioral contexts.
Bio: Vikash Gilja is an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and is a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Program faculty at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He directs the Translational Neural Engineering Laboratory, which develops and expands the capabilities of neural prosthetic systems. To realize this goal the lab develops machine learning based algorithms that interpret multimodal physiology data in realtime and validates these algorithms by conducting experiments in multiple clinical settings and animal models.
He also engages with the emerging neural prosthesis industry, previously working with the founding team of Neuralink Corp. and currently advising Paradromics, Inc. Prior to joining UCSD he was a research associate in the Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory at Stanford University, extending the BrainGate clinical trial to Stanford. He received the B.S. degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the B.S./M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2003 and 2004 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University in 2010.
FREE
Open to the Public
