Research

Until 2020 I was a principal investigator at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, which is part of the Faculty of Science of the University of Zurich and also the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. At the moment I am inactive in research due to commitments with startups, although I still mentor technology transfer cases and teach at the Uni Zurich Innovation Hub. Some of my projects are described below. My old profile page is here (not up to date).

Ada – Intelligent Space

I worked on this project during my PhD, along with a large team of over 20 people. Ada was shown to about half a million people at the Swiss national exhibition Expo.02 in Neuchatel from 15 May 2002 to 20 October 2002. This project can be described as part robot, part performance art, part public experiment, and part research project. It is described in more detail on its official web page, but think smart disco meets intelligent room and you will get the general idea. Related work on building intelligence has also been done here.

Some of the things we built and found out during the project include:

More than 20 years later, the issues we explored in the project are still relevant. The project was a forerunner of today's (and tomorrow's) world of IoT for managing building efficiency and occupant well-being.

You can see me here giving a talk in 2012 about Ada on TEDx. Giving this talk was an interesting experience, not least because my videos didn’t work (even though I had tested them beforehand) and I had to ad-lib my way through most of the talk describing what was in the non-existent videos. Luckily, the organizers managed to edit the video afterwards so that you couldn’t really tell the difference.

Neuroscience of Virtual Reality

The key questions I'm interested in are:

Some of the things we have discovered are summarized in headline form below (some links lead to paywalled journal websites):

Virtual Reality Neurorehabilitation

The basic research on virtual reality is applied in clinical work on interactive virtual reality training for patients with stroke, cerebral palsy, spinal cord injury and other conditions. There is also a video explaning the basic concept behind the VR rehabilitation system below. If you want to know more about virtual reality applied to rehabilitation, you may want to consider joining the International Society for Virtual Rehabilitation (I was on the board from 2012-2017). It publishes a regular newsletter and there is a Facebook group for all people interested in the topic.

Neuromorphic Engineering

Neuromorphic Engineering is, to put it briefly, the exploitation of key principles by which brains work to build artificial computing systems that work in the real world. The long-term bet is that these systems will show large advantages in terms of decision robustness in uncertain environments, reaction time, and energy efficiency.

I have been involved in a relatively small way in some projects:

Publications

Academic Papers

Some ways of finding my academic publications:

Patents