Rajesh P. N. Rao

Rajesh P.N. Rao (born July 2, 1970 in Madras, India) is the Director of the NSF Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE) and the Cherng Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle.^[1]

He is a researcher in the fields of computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and brain-computer interfacing. He also works on the 4000-year-old Indus script, a topic on which he has given a TED talk.^[2] He is the author of the book Brain-Computer Interfacing (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of two volumes, Probabilistic Models of the Brain (MIT Press, 2002) and Bayesian Brain (MIT Press, 2007).

In the first demonstration of human brain-to-brain communication in August 2013, Rao wearing an electrical brain-signal reading cap triggered the movement of his colleague Andrea Stocco's hand via the Internet, allowing their brains to cooperate to solve a computer game.^[3] The demonstration was subsequently replicated across other pairs of humans and the results published in the journal PLOS ONE.^[4]

With Prof. Adrienne Fairhall, Rao offered the first massive open online course in computational neuroscience in 2013.

Rao graduated summa cum laude from Angelo State University in 1992 with a B.S. in Computer Science and in Mathematics. He then attended the University of Rochester where he earned his M.S. (1994) and Ph.D. (1998) in Computer Science.^[1]

Awards

• Sloan Faculty Fellowship, 2001 ^[1]
• Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, 2002 ^[1]
• NSF CAREER Award 2002 ^[5]
• ONR Young Investigator Award, 2003 ^[6]

References

External links

• Home page and publications
• fusione mentale
• Rajesh Rao at TED
  
• TED talk: A Rosetta Stone for a lost language (TED2011)