Michael A. Arbib Fletcher Jones Professor Computer Science, Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Neuroscience, Psychology College of Letters Arts & Sciences Viterbi School of Engineering

Education:
BSc(Hons) 1960 Mathematics - University of Sydney, Australia
PhD 1963 Mathematics - Massachusettes Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusettes

Postdoctoral Research Fellowship:
1964 Imperial College of London, United Kingdom
1965 Stanford University, California

Started at USC: 1986

Research Topics: Vision Research, Computational Biology

Research Description

The thrust of Michael Arbib's work is expressed in the title of his first book, Brains, Machines and Mathematics (McGraw-Hill,1964). The brain is not a computer in the current technological sense, but he has based his career on the argument that we can learn much about machines from studying brains, and much about brains from studying machines. He has thus always worked for an interdisciplinary environment in which computer scientists and engineers can talk to neuroscientists and cognitive scientists. At the University of Massachusetts he helped found the Center for Systems Neuroscience, the Cognitive Science Program, and the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics, for each of which he served as director. At USC, he was founder and first Director of the Center for Neural Engineering. His research focuses on the coordination of perception and action.This is tackled at two levels: via schema theory, which is applicable both in top-down analyses of brain function and human cognition as well as in studies of machine vision and robotics; and through the detailed analysis of neural networks, working closely with the experimental findings of neuroscientists on humans and monkeys. He is also engaged in research on the evolution of brain mechanisms for human language.

Arbib is the author or editor of 38 books. His edited volume, The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks (The MIT Press, Second Edition, 2003) is a massive compendium embracing studies in detailed neuronal function, system models of brain regions, connectionist models of psychology and linguistics, mathematical and biological studies of learning, and technological applications of artificial neural networks. Neural Organization: Structure, Function, and Dynamics (The MIT Press, 1998), co-authored with Peter Érdi and the late John Szentágothai, provides a comprehensive view of the working of the brain. Most recently, Jean-Marc Fellous and he have edited Who Needs Emotions: The Brain Meets the Robot (Oxford University Press, 2005) while he has edited Action To Language via the Mirror Neuron System (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Research Topics: Brain Mechanisms of Visually-Guided Action and Language; Computational Models of Stroke Rehabilitation; Neuroinformatics; Autonomous Robots Based on Inspiration from Biology