Eric L. Schwartz

Eric L. Schwartz (born 1947) is Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Boston University.

Previously, he was Associate Professor of Psychiatry at New York University Medical Center and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.

He introduced the term Computational Neuroscience through the organization of a conference with this title which took place in Carmel California in 1985, under the sponsorship of the Systems Development Foundation. Encouraged by program director Charles Smith, this conference, whose proceedings were later published by MIT Press(1990), provided a summary of progress in the related fields which were till then referred to as neural networks, neural modeling, brain theory, theoretical neuroscience and a variety of other terms. Organizing these fields along the dimensions of spatial and temporal measurement, the conference, and its later publication in book form, introduced the use of the term "Computational Neuroscience". In the subsequent decades, dozens of University Departments and Programs have adopted this umbrella title.

He founded Vision Applications, Inc. in 1990, with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for the purpose of developing actuators, sensors and algorithms for miniaturized space-variant vision systems. Patents developed at Vision Applications included a novel spherically actuated motor [1], a CMOS VLSI log-plar sensor prototype [2] and algorithms for real-time synthesis of space-variant images [3].

This work culminated in the construction of a miniature autonomous vehicle which was the first vehicle to drive, unassisted by human backup, on the streets of Boston (1992) [4].

Although it has been known since the turn of the century that the visual image recorded by the retina is relayed to visual cortex in the form of an orderly two dimensional pattern of neural firing (visuotopy, topographic mapping, retinotopy), the first two dimensional mathematical description of this mapping in primates was provided by Schwartz in 1976 [5] and 1977 [6], and together with collaborators Al Wolf and Dave Christman he provided the first direct visualization of human cortical retinotopy via positron tomography [7].

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