We all know intuitively what we mean by motion. Motion is change, evolution, development. A dove soars across a turquoise noon-day sky; a meteor plunges earthward from the night-black heavens; a train derails and falls off a bridge, plummeting to the jagged rocks below. The world is alive with motion.
-- Michael A. Morrison, Understanding Quantum Physics

Ashvin Shah     My e mail address is: my first name at gmail dot com. I am now a post-doc with Kevin Gurney and the Adaptive Behaviour Research Group in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield in England. PhD (2008), Neuroscience and Behavior, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Advisor: Andrew G. Barto. BA (1997), Physics, Wesleyan University.

Academic Info

• Areas of interest include skill acquisition, reinforcement learning, decision-making, computational neuroscience, and motor control.


• I am working on and funded by the large EU project, Intrinsically Motivated Cumulative Learning Versatile Robots (IM-CLeVeR, European Community 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013), Challenge 2 - Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics, grant agreement No. ICT-IP-231722).


• I did my PhD research in the Autonomous Learning Laboratory, Department of Computer Science at UMass .


• Peeps Research, with Marc Pickett I

Publications

• A Shah (2012) 
  Psychological and Neuroscientific Connections with Reinforcement Learning
  In Marco Wiering and Martijn van Otterlo, editors, Reinforcement Learning: State of the Art, Chapter 16, pages 507--537. Published by Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg.
  [ pdf (preprint) ]


• A Shah and AG Barto (2009)
  Effect on Movement Selection of an Evolving Sensory Representation: A Multiple Controller Model of Skill Acquisition
  Brain Research, vol. 1299 (special issue on Computational Cognitive Neuroscience II, edited by Sue Becker and Nathaniel Daw), pages 55--73.
  [ pdf ]


• A Shah (2008)
  Biologically-Based Functional Mechanisms of Motor Skill Acquisition
  PhD thesis, Neuroscience and Behavior Program, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
  [ abstract | pdf ]


• A Shah, AH Fagg, and AG Barto (2004)
  Cortical Involvement in the Recruitment of Wrist Muscles
  Journal of Neurophysiology vol. 91, pages 2445--2456
  [ pdf ]


• AH Fagg, A Shah, and AG Barto (2002)
  A Computational Model of Muscle Recruitment for Wrist Movements
  Journal of Neurophysiology vol. 88, pages 3348--3358
  [ pdf ]


• Posters
  
  
  
  • A Shah and K Gurney (2011)
    Dopamine-Mediated Action Discovery Promotes Optimal Behaviour 'For Free'
    poster presented at the Twentieth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting (CNS*2011), July 23 -- 28, 2011, Stockholm, Sweden. Abstract published in BMC Neuroscience 2011, 12 (Suppl 1):P138 (18 July 2011).
    [ abstract | pdf ]
  
  
  • A Shah and AG Barto (2007)
    Effect on Movement Selection of Evolving Sensory Representation
    poster presented at the Third Annual Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Conference (CCNC07), in conjunction with Dynamical Neuroscience XV, November 1 -- 2, San Diego, CA.
    [ pdf ]
  
  
  • A Shah and AG Barto (2007)
    Functional Mechanisms of Motor Skill Acquisition
    poster presented at the Sixteenth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting (CNS*2007), July 7th - 12th, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Abstract published in BMC Neuroscience 2007, 8 (Suppl 2):P203 (6 July 2007).
    [ abstract | pdf ]
  
  
  • A Shah, AG Barto, and AH Fagg (2006)
    Biologically-Based Functional Mechanisms of Coarticulation
    poster presented at Neural Control of Movement Conference, May 2-7, 2006, Key Biscayne, FL.
    [ pdf ]
  
  
  • A Shah, AH Fagg, and AG Barto (2002)
    Cortical Involvement in the Recruitment of Wrist Muscles
    poster presented at Neural Control of Movement Conference, April 14-21, 2002, Naples, FL
    [ abstract | pdf ]
  
  
  • A Shah, AH Fagg, and AG Barto (2001)
    A Computational Model of Muscle Recruitment for Wrist Movements
    poster presented at Neural Control of Movement Conference, March 25-30, 2001, Seville, Spain
    [ abstract | pdf ]

Links (non-academic)