天美传媒

Michael Halassa is a physician-scientist and associate professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine. His work focuses on understanding how the brain controls thoughts and actions based on an internal model of the world. His PhD work at the University of Pennsylvania was focused on cellular neuroscience and his postdoctoral work at MIT was focused on systems neuroscience. Halassa also spends some of his time performing clinical work, focused on treatment of psychotic disorders. His ultimate goal is to come up with a circuit-based computational description of inference and belief updating that would explain how psychotic states arise and provide a clear path towards intervention. 

Christensen is a national policy leader for the field of robotics and has testified before Congress on the subject. He is the head of a nationwide effort to draft a robotics roadmap and explore the field’s potential to transform U.S. society. Most recently, he served as Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech. Christensen's research covers computer vision, artificial intelligence and robotics, and his primary emphasis has been on a systems-oriented approach to machine perception, robotics and design of intelligent machines. He and his team seek solutions that are theoretically sound, with well-defined implementations that can be evaluated in realistic situations. He has worked with a number of industry partners, including Boeing, KUKA, iRobot, BMW and Apple.


 
Before joining UC San Diego as director of the Contextual Robotics Institute at the Jacobs School, he was the founding director of Institute for Robotics and Intelligent machines (IRIM) at Georgia Institute of Technology (2006-2016). He has published more than 350 contributions across AI, robotics and vision. Christensen received the Engelberger Award 2011, the highest honor awarded by the robotics industry. He was also awarded the "Boeing Supplier of the Year 2011" with 3 other colleagues at Georgia Tech. Christensen is a fellow of American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He received an honorary doctorate in engineering from Aalborg University 2014.