Title: Robust Control over Delayed and Quantized Feedback with
Applications to Human Sensorimotor Control

Speaker: Yorie Nakahira (Caltech)

Abstract: The modern view of the nervous system as layering
distributed computation and communication for the purpose of
sensorimotor control and homeostasis has much experimental evidence
but little theoretical foundation, leaving unresolved the connection
between diverse components and complex behavior. As a simple starting
point, we address a fundamental tradeoff when robust control is done
using communication with both delay and quantization error, which are
both extremely heterogeneous and highly constrained in human and
animal nervous systems. This yields surprisingly simple and tight
analytic bounds with clear interpretations and insights regarding hard
tradeoffs, optimal coding and control strategies, and their
relationship with well known physiology and behavior. These results
are similar to reasoning routinely used informally by experimentalists
to explain their findings, but very different from those based on
information theory and statistical physics (which have dominated
theoretical neuroscience).