Emanuel (Emo) Vassilev Todorov (born 1971), a neuroscientist, is an associate professor and director of the Movement Control Laboratory at the University of Washington. He introduced the use of

optimal control Optimal control theory is a branch of mathematical optimization that deals with finding a control for a dynamical system over a period of time such that an objective function is optimized. It has numerous applications in science, engineering and ...

as a formal explanatory framework for biological movement (see below). He is the principal developer of the MuJoCo physics engine. Todorov completed his PhD in MIT under the supervision of

Michael Jordan Michael Jeffrey Jordan (born February 17, 1963), also known by his initials MJ, is an American businessman and former professional basketball player. His biography on the official NBA website states: "By acclamation, Michael Jordan is the g ...

and

Whitman Richards Whitman Albin Richards (1932–16 September 2016) was professor of cognitive sciences and of media arts and sciences and principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Te ...

. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL under

Peter Dayan Peter Dayan is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. He is co-author of ''Theoretical Neuroscience'', an influential textbook on computational neuroscience. He is known for applying Bayesian metho ...

and Geoffrey Hinton. He is a recipient of the 2004 Sloan Fellowship in neuroscience. In 2002 he proposed that stochastic optimal control principles are a good theoretical framework for explaining biological movement. In 2011 this view was acknowledged by one of its critics,

Karl Friston Karl John Friston FRS FMedSci FRSB (born 12 July 1959) is a British neuroscientist and theoretician at University College London. He is an authority on brain imaging and theoretical neuroscience, especially the use of physics-inspired stati ...

, to have become "the dominant paradigm for understanding motor behavior in formal or computational terms." It has been described in the popular scientific press together with other connections between biology and optimisation principles. An editorial comment by Kenji Doya about one of Todorov's articles in PNAS called it "a refreshingly new approach in optimal control based on a novel insight as to the duality of optimal control and statistical inference". His work on robotic hands has been featured in popular publications on robotics. In January 2017 he was interviewed for the Robots Podcast. He is the recipient of 11 National Science Foundation grant awards totalling more than $7.5 million as Principal Investigator.

References

External links

The Movement Control Laboratory

{{DEFAULTSORT:Todorov, Emanuel Living people American neuroscientists Bulgarian neurologists 1971 births Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Artificial intelligence researchers University of Washington faculty