Shinjiro Sueda, a Ph.D. student working on the Major Thematic Grant (MTG) project in the Sensorimotor Systems Laboratory, was invited to visit the Digital Human Research Center (DHRC) at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tokyo from September to November, 2008. Together with the MTG's external collaborator Dr. Mitsunori Tada (DHRC) and Dr. Toshiyasu Nakamura (Keio University), Sueda worked on a novel hardware and software setup for imaging and reconstructing 3D models of the human hand, which can be used for numerous medical applications, such as predicting surgery outcomes and designing better musculotendon simulators.

The first progress report for this project is now available on this web site.

Dinesh K. Pai, Principal Investigator of the PWIAS MTG on Sensorimotor Computation, and MTG participant Dr. Andrea d'Avella (Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome) received a program grant from the Human Frontier Science Program. These are highly competitive and prestigious grants: 774 letters of intent were submitted to the international competition, of which 88 were were selected for a full proposal, and 18 grants were awarded. Their project, entitled "Learning from the unlearnable: probing the architecture of control in tool manipulation" will investigate modularity in the brain using novel computational methods, sensing technologies, computer graphics, and haptic displays.