Research Interests – Education – Experience – Publications
Personal info
| Position |
PostDoc |
| Email |
thomas.buehrmann AT gmail DOT com |
| Website |
Personal IAS blog |
| Phone |
0034987123654 |
| Address |
EHU-UPV, Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, Avenida de Tolosa 70, 20080 Donostia – San Sebastián |
Summary
My main research interest concerns the widespread assumption that skilled motor coordination is the result of homuncular computational control of the body by the brain. According to this robotics-inspired view, the complexities of the control problem (redundancy, feedback delays, noise, non-linearities) require the brain to build detailed internal models (forward and inverse) of the body “plant”. On the other end of the spectrum (synergetics, morphological computation, passive dynamics), it is becoming clear that the body itself might be structured such as to allow for self-organisation of useful motor patterns. My work explores the extent to which a particular embodiment allows for motor coordination to arise without the need for detailed internal models.
Find a short CV below. A more complete version can be found at linkedIn.
Research interests
- Biological Autonomy
- Non-linear dynamics and synergetics
- Morphology and motor coordination
Education
D.Phil. in Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence – University of Sussex
Thesis: “On the intrinsic control properties of muscles and reflexes: Exploring the interaction between neural and musculoskeletal dynamics in the framework of the equilibrium-point hypothesis”
M.Sc. in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems – University of Sussex
Thesis: “Model-free robot control. Incremental evolution of dynamic neuro-controllers for visually-guided movement”
B.Sc. in Cognitive Science – Universität Osnabrück
Thesis: “Cognitive aspects of 3d interaction in virtual environments”
Experience
Based in the University of the Basque Country and part of the european project “Extending Sensorimotor Contingencies to Cognition”
2007 – 2011: Lead Behaviour Engineer – NaturalMotion
Development of euphoria, the next-generation physical and adaptive character simulation technology.
2003 – 2006: Teaching Assistant and Webmaster
Assisted University of Sussex courses such as Adaptive Systems, Animal and Machine Intelligence, Formal Computational Skills and Non-Symbolic AI. Created and administrated website for the CCNR lab.
2001 – 2002: Research Assistant – Fraunhofer Institute
Programming of virtual reality environments and interaction for psychophysical experiments conducted in the Institute for Media Communication.
Publications
2013
Buhrmann, T., Paolo, E. A. D., & Barandiaran, X. (2013). A dynamical systems account of sensorimotor contingencies. Frontiers in Cognition, 4:, 285. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00285
2008
Izquierdo, E., & Buhrmann, T. (2008). Analysis of a dynamical recurrent neural network evolved for two qualitatively different tasks: walking and chemotaxis. In S. Bullock, J. Noble, R. Watson, & M. Bedau (Eds.),
Artificial Life XI: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (pp. 257–264). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Retrieved from
http://www.alifexi.org/papers/ALIFExi_pp257-264.pdf
2007
Frenz, H., Lappe, M., Kolesnik, M., & Buhrmann, T. (2007). Estimation of travel distance from visual motion in virtual environments. ACM Trans. Appl. Percept., 4(1). doi:10.1145/1227134.1227137
2006
Buhrmann, T., & Paolo, E. (2006). Biological Actuators Are Not Just Springs. In S. Nolfi, G. Baldassarre, R. Calabretta, J. C. T. Hallam, D. Marocco, J.-A. Meyer, … D. Parisi (Eds.),
From Animals to Animats 9 (Vol. 4095, pp. 89–100). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Retrieved from
http://dblp.uni-trier.de/rec/bibtex/conf/sab/BuehrmannP06 (Download)
2005
Lappe, M., Frenz, H., Buhrmann, T., & Kolesnik, M. (2005). Virtual odometry from visual flow.
Proceedings of SPIE,
5666(1), 493. doi:doi:10.1117/12.610863
(Download)
2004
Buhrmann, T., & Di Paolo, E. A. (2004). Closing the loop: Evolving a model-free visually guided robot arm. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems 9 (pp. 63–72). Presented at the Artificial Life IX, Boston, Massachusetts: MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
