Rajesh P. N. Rao (born July 2, 1970 in Madras, India) is the Director of the NSF Center for Neurotechnology (CNT) and the Cherng Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seat ...

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. He is a researcher in the fields of computational neuroscience,

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machine A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, moveme ...

, and brain-computer interfacing. With Dana Ballard, he proposed the predictive coding model of brain function in 1999. He has contributed to Bayesian models of perception and decision making. In brain-computer interfacing, Prof. Rao and his collaborators were the first to demonstrate direct brain control of a humanoid robot in 2007. In the first demonstration of human brain-to-brain communication in August 2013, Rao wearing an electrical brain-signal reading cap triggered the movement of his colleague Andrea Stocco's hand via the Internet, allowing their brains to cooperate to solve a computer game. The demonstration was subsequently replicated across other pairs of humans and extended to other tasks and to a BrainNet for more than two brains. Rao also works on the decipherment of the Indus script. By comparing the entropy of the Indus script with entropies of linguistic scripts such as those for

Sumerian Sumerian or Sumerians may refer to: *Sumer, an ancient civilization **Sumerian language **Sumerian art **Sumerian architecture **Sumerian literature **Cuneiform script, used in Sumerian writing *Sumerian Records, an American record label based in ...

and Old Tamil, and nonlinguistic sequences such as DNA and a programming language, his work suggested that the Indus script behaves more like a linguistic script than nonlinguistic sequences. He has also given a TED talk on the same topic where he backed the Dravidian hypothesis put forward by Iravatham Mahadevan. Rao is the author of the book Brain-Computer Interfacing (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of two volumes, Probabilistic Models of the Brain ( MIT Press, 2002) and Bayesian Brain (MIT Press, 2007). He has given a TEDx talk on "Brain co-processors: When AI meets the Brain." With Prof. Adrienne Fairhall, Rao offered the first massive open online course in

computational neuroscience Computational neuroscience (also known as theoretical neuroscience or mathematical neuroscience) is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematical models, computer simulations, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to ...

in 2013. The course continues to be offered on Coursera. Rao graduated summa cum laude from Angelo State University in 1992 with a B.S. in Computer Science and in Mathematics. He then attended the University of Rochester where he earned his M.S. (1994) and Ph.D. (1998) in Computer Science. He was a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies before joining the

faculty in 2000.

Awards

* Sloan Faculty Fellowship, 2001 *

Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is a private foundation that provides grants to not-for-profit organizations. It was created in 1964 by David Packard (co-founder of HP) and his wife Lucile Salter Packard. Following David Packard's deat ...

, 2002 *

NSF CAREER Award The National Science Foundation CAREER awards, presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF), are in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research and education, and the integration of these endeavors ...

2002 * ONR Young Investigator Award, 2003 * Guggenheim Fellowship 2016

References

External links

Home page and publications

fusione mentale
* * TED talk
A Rosetta Stone for a lost language
(TED2011) * TEDx talk
Brain Co-Processors: When AI Meets the Brain
(TEDx Berkeley 2020) {{DEFAULTSORT:Rao, Rajesh P.N. University of Washington faculty Angelo State University alumni University of Rochester alumni 1970 births Living people Place of birth missing (living people) American neuroscientists