Louisiana Tech University’s Center for Biomedical Engineering and Rehabilitation Science (CBERS) and its Consortium on Neuronal Networks in Epilepsy and Memory (NeuroNEM) will host a presentation by Dr. Jose C. Principe, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida, as part of the Seminar Series on Probing and Understanding the Brain. The invited talk titled, “Somatosensory Brain Machine Interfaces,” will begin at 12:30 p.m. on March 17 in the auditorium of the Institute for Micromanufacturing (IfM) at Louisiana Tech.  The event is free to attend and the public is cordially invited. Principe will discuss the development of the modeling and signal-processing infrastructure to implement somatosensory Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) that contribute to bringing the feeling of touch to a subject when a robotic device grabs an object under the subject’s brain control.  Principe will present the adaptive inverse control scheme and the involved spike kernels in the modeling of the problem. At the University of Florida, Principe teaches advanced signal processing and machine learning. He is the BellSouth Professor and Founding Director of the University of Florida’s Computational Neuro-Engineering Laboratory (CNEL), and his research interests are focused in BMI and the modeling and applications of cognitive systems. Principe has authored five books, more than 250 publications in refereed journals and book chapters, and 500 conference papers.  He has directed 89 Ph.D. dissertations and 67 Master’s theses, and his H-index is 67 (Google Scholar).  Principe is an IEEE, AIMBE and IAMBE Fellow, and a recipient of the INNS Gabor Award, the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award and the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Career Achievement Award.  He has also received the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Neural Network Pioneer Award and Honorary doctorate degrees from Universita Mediterranea in Italy, University of Maranhao in Brazil and Aalto University in Finland. In addition to his teaching and research activities, Principe serves as the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Reviews on Biomedical Engineering and is the past editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.  He is also a current ADCOM member of the IEEE CIS society, IEEE Biometrics Council, and IEEE BME society, member of the Technical Committee on Machine Learning for Signal Processing of the IEEE Signal Processing Society; past president and current member of the College of Fellows of the International Neural Network Society (INNS), and a former member of the Scientific Board of the Food and Drug Administration. The “Somatosensory Brain Machine Interfaces” talk and Principe’s visit is sponsored by NeuroNEM, the Biomedical Engineering Research and Career Development Council, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and Alpha Eta Mu Beta.  For more information, contact BMEres@latech.edu or visit www.neuronem.latech.edu.