My apolo­gies for not hav­ing blogged in a few days. I landed back in San Fran­cisco today after speak­ing and par­tic­i­pat­ing in a very stim­u­lat­ing event put together by the Ari­zona State Uni­ver­sity’s Adap­tive Neural Sys­tems Cen­ter with fund­ing from the National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion.

The 2-day sym­po­sium was titled Co-Adaptive Learn­ing: Adap­tive Tech­nol­ogy for the Aging (link opens a PDF with the agenda), fea­tured impres­sive speak­ers and a highly qual­i­fied audi­ence, and cov­ered a wide array of cur­rent and future health­care and aging appli­ca­tions of neu­ro­science. The one aspect that was very mean­ing­ful for me to observe how often we dis­cussed cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, cog­ni­tive deficits, cog­ni­tive assess­ments, cog­ni­tive enhance­ment tools (both inva­sive and non-invasive) in a vari­ety of healthy aging and clin­i­cal contexts.

I will share more about the event in the next few days, includ­ing links to the fas­ci­nat­ing work pre­sented by speak­ers, but let me know sim­ply thank the two gra­cious orga­niz­ers and hosts of the event by quot­ing the goal of their cen­ter and work:

- Jimmy Abbas, PhD: “One of the hall­marks of bio­log­i­cal sys­tems is the abil­ity to adapt. In our work, we mimic neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal sys­tems in order to endow tech­nol­ogy with the abil­ity to adapt, and we use tech­nol­ogy to max­i­mize adap­ta­tions in neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal sys­tems. With these approaches, we aim to pro­mote func­tional adap­ta­tion after disability.”

- Ranu Jung, PhD: “Our goal is to improve the qual­ity of life of indi­vid­u­als with dis­abil­i­ties by design­ing tech­niques to inves­ti­gate, replace and repair dam­aged neural sys­tems to enhance mobil­ity and func­tion­al­ity. Whether a per­son has spinal cord injury, limb loss or Parkinson’s dis­ease, mobil­ity and func­tion­al­ity mean independence.”

Links:

Cen­ter: Adap­tive Neural Sys­tems Center.

Agenda (PDF): Co-Adaptive Learn­ing: Adap­tive Tech­nol­ogy for the Aging

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