Project description:

Applications are invited for a Research Support Tech in the Theoretical and Cognitive Neuroscience (TCN), Moreno Bote Lab, https://www.upf.edu/web/tcn, led by Ruben Moreno Bote, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). The candidate will form part of the project Theory of maximally occupying multi-agents funded by the Air Force Defense Research Sciences Program, Office of Scientific Research United States Air Force. The position is for 6-12 months. The project aims to study the computational mechanisms underlying complex sensorimotor control in humans, other animals, and artificial agents. We will use stochastic optimal control theory to uncover general principles of motor control and to develop semi-analytical algorithms for problems that include realistic sources of sensorimotor variability, such as sensory, motor, and internal noise.



The project has the objective of providing interpretable solutions to complex motor-control problems and clarifying how biological systems might handle multiple interacting noise sources; this would also allow us to develop inverse optimal control tools to explain human sensorimotor behavior under rationality principles. Finally, we aim to test whether these optimal strategies emerge in biologically constrained recurrent networks, thereby generating experimentally testable predictions about neural dynamics and sensorimotor computation. The optimal-control part of the project will study time-varying linear dynamical systems with quadratic costs and additive and multiplicative noise, extending the classical Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian framework to more realistic sensorimotor settings. Using Lagrange multiplier techniques, we aim to derive iterative semi-analytical algorithms for these stochastic control problems, which can then be embedded in inverse optimal control pipelines to fit human behavioral data through maximum-likelihood approaches. In parallel, full-rank and low-rank recurrent neural networks will be trained

📌 ENG-PSR-P-30: Specialist support technician: (Barcelona)
🏢 Pompeu Fabra University
📍 Barcelona