Speakers
Professor at Dept. of Biotechnology, IIT-Madras
Computational Neuroscience Lab
Biography:
V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy obtained his BTech from IIT Madras, MS /Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He received postdoctoral training in the neuroscience department at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. The Computational Neuroscience Lab (CNS Lab) that he heads works on developing models of the basal ganglia, spatial navigation, stroke rehabilitation, and neurovascular coupling. He is the author of two books in neuroscience. He is the inventor of a novel script called Bharati, a unified script for Indian languages.
Assistant Professor at School of Neuroscience, Virginia Tech.
Neural Dynamics and Neural Engineering Lab
Biography:
I was born in the state of Kerala, India and immigrated to the U.S. as a young child. I grew up in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have spent most of my adult life in Massachusetts, where all of my post-secondary education took place.
I have a long-standing interest in the neural dynamics underlying sensory processing, sleep, and learning and memory. To investigate these dynamics I use a combination of computational modeling, signal processing techniques, and both invasive and noninvasive experimental methods of recording brain activity.
In graduate work in the laboratories of Dr. Matthew Wilson (MIT) and Dr. Emery Brown (Harvard Medical School/MIT), I collected electrophysiological recordings from the hippocampus and somatosensory cortex of rats during active behavior and sleep in order to gain insight into general sleep physiology and the role of sleep physiological activity in memory consolidation. In postdoctoral work with Dr. Nancy Kopell (Boston University), I constructed biophysically realistic computational models to account for the pathological occurrence of alpha activity during slow wave sleep. This led to additional work modeling alpha activity during stimulus processing and in anesthetic states. For my postdoctoral work I also examined intracranial data (both electrocorticography (ECoG) and depth electrode data) from epileptic patients to determine the role of sleep oscillations in memory consolidation during both rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and slow wave sleep (SWS). This work led to the discovery of a candidate mechanism for emotional and procedural motor memory consolidation during REM sleep
Professor at Dept. of Applied Mechanics, IIT-Madras
Biography:
Dr.M.Manivannan is a professor of Biomedical Engineering in IIT Madras, Department of Applied Mechanics. He received post-doctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. He was a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) of Harvard Medical School (HMS) in Boston, and a visiting faculty in the Christian Medical College (CMC) Vellore. Before MIT and Harvard, he received another post-doctoral training at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Maryland. Before joining IIT Madras in Jun 2005, he was serving as a chief software architect of Yantric Inc., a spin-off company of MIT Touchlab, in Cambridge MA. In 2005 Dr.Manivannan has setup the first Touchlab in India at IIT Madras, which is also known as Haptics Lab. He holds PhD and ME degrees from the Indian Institute of Science(IISc), Bangalore.
Assistant Professor at Dept. of Applied Mechanics, IIT-Madras
Biography:
Dr. Varadhan SKM is a faculty in Biomedical Engg at IIT Madras. He works on neural control of movement in health and disease. In collaboration with this students, he uses the human hand as a model system to study neural control of movements in dexterous manipulation. In this talk, he will discuss a computational approach to understanding grasp postures and development of a perturbation system to understand challenging grasping tasks.
Associate Professor at Dept. of Management Studies, IIT-Madras
Biography:
Dr. Lata Dyaram is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management Studies IITM. Before joining IIT Madras in 2011, she was serving in IT industry. She holds PhD degree in Organizational Behaviour and Masters in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and University of Mumbai respectively. She holds professional certifications/accreditations in psychometric assessments: MBTI, FIRO-B, DISC, BELBIN, MSCEIT, PAPI, NLP and is master trainer in leadership development programs such as 7 Habits of Highly effective People by Franklin Covey International and Crucial Conversations by Vital Smarts USA.
She explores volitional & discretionary phases at work, spontaneous mental states and goal directed behaviour across contexts, team/group dynamics and related constructs in workplace behaviour. In collaboration with students, she employs mixed research methods, qualitative measures, large scale organizational surveys and field experiments to study varied phenomena.
Professor at Cognitive Science, IIIT-Hyderabad
Brain, Cognition & Computation Lab
Biography:
Raju S. Bapi received the BE (Electrical Engineering) degree from Osmania University, the MS (Biomedical Engineering) and PhD (Mathematical Sciences Computer Science) degrees from the University of Texas, Arlington, USA. He worked at BHEL, India; the University of Plymouth, UK; and ATR Research Labs, Kyoto, Japan before joining the University of Hyderabad. After having served University of Hyderabad till 2019, he joined as Professor at IIIT Hyderabad, India and is associated with the Cognitive Science Lab, Kohli Centre for Intelligent Systems (KCIS), IIIT-H.
His research interests include the practical applications of various neural network and machine learning techniques, investigation of biological neural architectures, empirical experiments using behavioural and neuroimgaing assays and cognitive modelling. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, member of the ACM, Society for Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Society.
Professor at Institute of Computational Engineering, University of Luxembourg
Biography:
Born in Paris, France in 1975, Stéphane joined in 1999 a joint graduate programme of the French Institute of Technology (Ecole Speciale des Travaux Publics) and the American Northwestern University. In 2003, he graduated in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics with a Ph.D. from Northwestern University under the guidance of Professor Brian Moran. Between 2003 and 2006, he was at the Laboratory of Structural and Continuum Mechanics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, working under the support of Professor Thomas Zimmermann. In 2006, he became permanent lecturer at Glasgow University Civil Engineering Department. Stéphane joined the Mechanics team at Cardiff University in 2009, as a Professor in Computational Mechanics and directed the institute of Mechanics and Advanced Materials from October 2010 to November 2013. In 2013, he joined the University of Luxembourg as a Professor in Computational Mechanics.
His areas of expertise are:
Computational mechanics with an emphasis on moving discontinuities (mechanics of fracture, biofilm growth, etc.)
Method development (enriched/extended finite elements, meshfree methods, smooth strain finite elements)
Evolving discontinuities
Academic research/industrial applications