8-9-17 Reverse Engineering the Sense of Touch 

Our August Presentation: The sense of touch is far less understood than vision or hearing. It remains an under-utilized modality in engineered systems, for good reason: we currently lack a detailed understanding of the physical processes that connect mechanical contact with objects to neural processing and conscious perception.

Technological progress in this area, including the development of new display devices that may address the sense of touch in the same way that a graphic display addresses the visual system, must be informed by an understanding of the physical processes that connect mechanical contact with objects to neural processing and conscious perception. This talk will review recent research in Dr. Visell's lab to address these challenges.

Our Speaker: Dr. Yon Visell, UCSB Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Media Arts & Technology Graduate Program, and Mechanical Engineering

Dr. Visell is an assistant professor at UCSB in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Media Arts & Technology Graduate Program, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering (by courtesy). He directs the RE Touch Lab, where his research involves haptic device engineering, robotics, electronics design, and haptic (touch) perception. He has published more than 60 scientific works and has edited two books on VR.

He received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from McGill University and MA and BA degrees in physics from the University of Texas, Austin and Wesleyan University respectively. He spent several years doing industrial R&D at leading audio processing and speech recognition companies including Ableton, Vocal Point (now part of the company that provides the Siri voice assistant), and ARL Austin. Prior to joining UCSB, he was an assistant professor at Drexel University and a post-doc at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris.

Dr. Visell is also an artist focusing on interactive art and design. His works have been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), SIGGRAPH (New Orleans, LA), Phaeno Science Center (Wolfsburg, Germany), and the Biennale of Design St.-Etienne (St. Etienne, France).

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