User:Vishuu

Pls visit my official home page for updated information about me and my work! http://www.vishwanathanmohan.com/

I am currently employed as a post doctoral scientist at the Robotics, Brain and Cognitive sciences department (RBCS) of the Italian Insititute of Technology iithome, a Research Foundation established by the Italian Republic (Ministry of Science and Research). Since 2005, I have been working at the headquarters of iit at Genova. Major part of my work profile can be described simply as playing with expensive toys (robots: baby humanoids, autonomous wheeled platforms, robotic animals etc). Working with robots, developing neural/computational architectures that make them percieve, think,reason, plan and move intelligently in complex worlds, I try to understand how our brains drive us exhibit similar behaviourial patterns, I try to understand how interaction between the body and the world, shapes the mind, shapes action and shapes reason, I try to understand how little children learn about the world, how abstract concepts, language and social behaviour develops through neural connectivity in the brains, and inversely can we create a robotic artifact that shows similar traits. This overlap between brain science and robotics is due to the fact that the problem that brain faces to control a body (human / animal) in its habitat is exactly the problem that a roboticist like me faces to make his robots move and act (intelligently) in their worlds. This kind of work is unconventional from the point of view of classical robotics and is ususally referred to as 'cogntive robotics'. The research I do is both extremely challenging, difficult and at the same time highly relavant – both from the intrinsic viewpoint of better understanding ourselves to creating artificial agents, robots, smart devices and machines that can reason and deal autonomously with our needs and with the peculiarities of the environments we inhabit and construct.

Education
PhD in Robotics, Brain and Cognitive sciences, Italian Institute of Technology and University of Genoa.

Thesis Title: ‘Cognitive Robots’ From Affordance to Action&back

Supervisors: Prof.Pietro Morasso, Prof. Giorgio Metta and Prof.Vittorio Sanguineti

M.Tech in Microelectronics and VLSI Design, Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Thesis Title: Studies on an electronic analog of a recurrent neural network with retrieval phase weight adaptations

Supervisor: Prof.V.Srinivas Chakravarthy

Junior College: at Mitihibai Mumbai.

Research


PhD Thesis If you are interested in knowing more about my recent research work, you can download my PhD thesis: "Cognitive Robots" From Affordance to Action from the following link PhD Thesis

This research was supported by the Italian Institute of Technology, a Research Institute Foundation established by the Italian Republic and the European Union through the FP6 project GNOSYS.

Life of GNOSYS

You can download a nice video of the life of the GNOSYS robot (based on my work on the gnosys reasoning and action generation architecture) form here link title:Large Movie of Gnosys

Important Publications
International Journals and Book Chapters

•Mohan, V., Morasso, P., Taylor, J., Kasderidis, S. (2007). Reasoning system. Deliverable 15 of EU Funded project GNOSYS, http://www.ics.forth.gr/gnosys/.

•Mohan, V., Morasso, P., Taylor, J., Kasderidis, S. (2007). Action generation system. Deliverable 16 of EU Funded project GNOSYS, http://www.ics.forth.gr/gnosys/.

•Mohan. V., Morasso, P. (2007). Towards reasoning and coordinating action in the mental space. International Journal of Neural Systems, 17, 4,1-13.

•Mohan, V., Morasso, P. (2006). A forward/inverse motor controller for Cognitive Robotics, Artificial Neural Networks - ICANN 2006, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4131/2006, p. 602-611, Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg.

•Mohan,V., Joshi, Y.V., Anand, I. (2004). Studies on an Electronic analog of a Recurrent Neural Network with retrieval Phase weight adaptations, Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Special Issue: Selected works from SCIS-ISCS 2004 (Editors: Lofti.A.Zadeh, T.Fukuda).

•Mohan,V., Varma, P., Joge, A. (2004). Efficient datapath design using 6*6 Conservative Reversible Logic, WSEAS Journal of Circuits and Systems, Vol 3, ISBN11092734.

Conference Proceedings, Deliverables

•Mohan, V., Morasso, P. (2008). ‘Reaching Extended’: Unified computational substrate for mental simulation and action execution in Cognitive Robots. Proceedings of third International conference of Cognitive science, CogSci 2008, Moscow, Russia (June 2008).

•Mohan. V, Morasso, P. (2007). ‘Neural Network of a Cognitive Crow’: An Interacting map based architecture, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Self Organizing and Self Adaptive Systems, MIT Boston, Mass., USA.

•Mohan,V. (2006). Dynamic Charge Recovery Logic, Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Low Power High Speed Chip design, April 21-24,Yokohama, Japan.

•Mohan,V., Joshi, Y.V, Anand, I. (2004). Studies on an Electronic analog of a Recurrent Neural Network with retrieval Phase weight adaptations, Proceedings of Joint IInd Intl.Conf. On soft computing and Intelligent Informatics, Sept 21-24 2004, Yokohama, Japan.

•Mohan,V., Varma, P., Joge, A. (2004). Efficient datapath design using 6*6 Conservative Reversible Logic, Proceedings of 8th WSEAS Circuits and Systems Multiconference, July 15-24, Athens, Greece.

•Mohan,V., Udayshankar,M., Chakravarthy,V.S. (2003). Inevitable Energy Costs of Storage Capacity Enhancement in an Oscillatory Neural Network,” Proceedings of 46th IEEE International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems, December 26-30 2003,Cairo.

•Mohan,V., Kumar.A., Manmohan, V., Udayshankar,M., Chakravarthy, V.S. (2002). Link between Energy and Computation in a Physical Model of Hopfield Network, 9th International Conference on Neural Information processing, 18-22.