Emanuel (Emo) Vassilev Todorov (born 1971 in Sofia, Bulgaria) is a neuroscientist working in neuroscience and artificial intelligence, who serves as an associate professor and director of the Movement Control Laboratory at the University of Washington.[1] He earned a B.S. from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1993 and completed his Ph.D. in 1998 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Michael I. Jordan and Whitman Richards.[3] He was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL under Peter Dayan and Geoffrey Hinton.[4]
Todorov introduced the use of optimal control as a formal explanatory framework for biological movement, proposing in 2002 that stochastic optimal control principles provide a solid theoretical framework for explaining motor behavior.[6] In 2011, this view was acknowledged by one of its critics, Karl Friston, to have become "the dominant paradigm for understanding motor behavior in formal or computational terms," and it has been covered in the popular scientific press along with other connections between biology and optimisation principles.[7,8] An editorial comment by Kenji Doya regarding one of Todorov's articles in PNAS characterized it as "a refreshingly new approach in optimal control based on a novel insight as to the duality of optimal control and statistical inference".[9] He is the principal developer of the MuJoCo physics engine, and his work on robotic hands has been featured in popular publications on robotics.[2,10]
A recipient of the 2004 Sloan Fellowship in neuroscience, Todorov has received 11 National Science Foundation grant awards totaling more than $7.5 million as Principal Investigator.[5,14] In January 2017, he was interviewed for the Robots Podcast.[13]
External links
External links include The Movement Control Laboratory and publications of Emanuel Todorov.