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David S Touretzky
Research Professor, CS

Email address: dst@cs.cmu.edu
Office: WEH 8128
Phone: (412) 268-7561
Fax: 412-268-3608

Mailing address:
Computer Science Department
5000 Forbes Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

For more information, see my personal homepage.

Jump to: Research interests | Keywords | Labs & groups | Projects | Publications

Research interests

The first of my two major research areas is the representation of spatial information in the rodent brain. I develop computational models of the hippocampus, an area thought to be involved in navigation and learning. There is evidence that the hippocampal "cognitive map" combines visual landmark information with another, internal sense of position maintained by path integration. I also model the rodent head direction system, which combines vestibular signals with visual landmark information to maintain an estimate of the animal's heading, and is a necessary prerequisite for path integration. My students and I have developed computational models which have reproduced a variety of behavioral and neurophysiological observations in these systems, and led to novel predictions.

My second major research area is models of animal learning and their implementation on mobile robots. Current projects include reinforcement learning models of the dopamine reward system, models of classical conditioning based on statistical inference, and a behavioral framework for the Sony AIBO robot.

This section last updated - January 1999.

Research interest keywords

artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, and machine learning

Current Labs & Groups [Past labs]

Tekkotsu Lab - Tekkotsu is an application development framework for robotics that supports high level robot programming, drawing inspiration from ideas in cognitive science. Our target platform is the Sony AIBO.

Past Projects

Skinnerbots - Trainable robots using operant conditioning.

Recent publications [View all 58 publications]

• Dual-coding representations for robot vision in Tekkotsu
  D.S. Touretzky, N.S. Halelamien, E. Tira-Thompson, J.J. Wales, and K. Usui
  Autonomous Robots, Vol. 22, No. 4, January, 2007, pp. 425 - 435. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [588 KB] copyrighted

• Influence of path integration vs. environmental orientation on place cell remapping between visually identical environments
  M.C. Fuhs, S.R. VanRhoads, A.E. Casale, B. McNaughton, and D.S. Touretzky
  Journal of Neurophysiology, 2005.

• Model uncertainty in classical conditioning
  A. Courville, N.D. Daw, G. Gordon, and D.S. Touretzky
  Advances in NeuralInformation Processing 16, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005.

• Tekkotsu: A framework for AIBO cognitive robotics.
  D.S. Touretzky and E. Tira-Thompson
  Proceedings of the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05), AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, 2005.

• Tekkotsu: Cognitive robotics on the Sony AIBO
  E. Tira-Thompson, N.S. Halelamien, J.J. Wales, and D.S. Touretzky
  Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Cognitive Modelling, July, 2004, pp. 390 - 391. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [91 KB] copyrighted

• Deforming the hippocampal map
  D.S. Touretzky, W.E. Weisman, M.C. Fuhs, W.E. Skaggs, A.A. Fenton, and R.U. Muller
  Hippocampus, Vol. 15, No. 1, June, 2004, pp. 41 - 55. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [672 KB] copyrighted

• Cognitive primitives for mobile robots
  E. Tira-Thompson, N.S. Halelamien, J.J. Wales, and D.S. Touretzky
  AAAI 2004 Fall Symposium Series, "The Intersection of Cognitive Science and Robotics: From Interfaces to Intelligence" report FS-04-05, 2004, pp. 110 - 111. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [219 KB] copyrighted

• Timing and partial observability in the dopamine system
  N. Daw, A. Courville, and D.S. Touretzky
  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15, S. Becker, S. Thrun, and K. Obermayer, ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [105 KB] copyrighted

• Long-term reward prediction in TD models of the dopamine system
  N. Daw and D.S. Touretzky
  Neural Computation, Vol. 14, No. 11, November, 2002, pp. 2567 - 2583. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [121 KB] copyrighted

• Combining configural and TD learning on a robot
  D.S. Touretzky, N. Daw, and E. Tira-Thompson
  Proceedings of the IEEE Second International Conference on Development and Learning, 2002, pp. 47 - 52. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [125 KB] copyrighted