Associate Professor
Computational Sensory-Motor Systems Lab
Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering
Johns Hopkins University
401 Barton Hall
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
Tel: (410) 516 3494
Fax: (410) 516 5566
retienne@jhu.edu
After completing my PhD at the University
of Pennsylvania, I became a faculty member at SIUC in 1995. I moved to Johns Hopkins University in 1998. 
I am
also affiliated with the Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research at
University
of Maryland, College Park. There I also direct an "institute
without
walls" on Neuromorphic Engineering. Although I enjoy being a
faculty
member at JHU, my home is the beautiful islands of Seychelles.
My research over the past 12 years has developed through three main
phases. In the early part of my career, I studied biologically inspired
sensors and sensory computation systems, primarily in the form of vision
sensors. Typically, these systems were implemented with Very Large Scale
Integrated (VLSI) technology and were used to extract information about
the environment and to guide the "attention" of other computation
systems. In the middle part of my career, I studied how these systems
can be hosted onto robots. At that point I also started to model spinal
neural circuits in silicon, and develop robots to study legged
locomotion. I developed a close collaboration with Prof. M. A. Lewis of
the University of Arizona and Iguana Robotics, Inc. Both VLSI circuits
and biomorphic robots were developed and used in these studies. (I
define a biomorphic robot as a mechanical device and control system that
mimics the form and function of its living counterpart. For example,
legged robots and prosthetic limbs are biomorphic robots.) More
recently, I have evolved this work to include brain-machine interfaces
and neural prosthesis devices. Specifically, I have started looking at
spinal and cortical prosthesis devices and robotic systems to restore
function after injury and for human augmentation. This new area has
required close collaboration with neuroscientists to gain access to
animal models (i.e. lamprey and cat preparations). Our recent work has
included various experiments to understand neurophysiology of spinal
neural circuits, to interface with them, to decode their sensory-motor
relationships, and to use these relationships to control biomorphic
robots. I plan to continue to expand this area research, while
leveraging my laboratory's expertise in VLSI circuits and systems,
visual and acoustical information processing, neuromorphic computation
systems and biomorphic robotics.
GRADUATE STUDENTS:
FORMER STUDENTS:
Playing with chips and robots in the Computational
Sensory-Motor Systems Lab at JHU.
Drop by if you would like to see what new and exciting things we are
doing!
I am also teaching:
Interesting Links