Speakers - NWC 2024

Biography

Professor Yoram Baram of the Computer Science Department at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, graduated in aeronautical engineering at the Technion in 1972. Moving to the US, he received the MSc in aeronautics and astronautics and the PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1974 and 1976, respectively. Having worked on airborne and marine control and navigation systems at the Analytic Sciences Corporation in Reading Massachusetts, he returned to Israel in 1978, where he became a professor of electrical engineering at Tel Aviv University, and then a professor of computer science at the Technion. Baram was invited to the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, where he spent two sabbatical terms, in 1986-1988 and in 1996-1998, as a Senior Research Associate of the US National Research Council and served there as a consultant during the following 20 years. Before returning to Israel in 1988, Baram has found considerable interest in the newly emerging field of neural networks, and, subsequently, taught the first courses in neural networks at the Technion.

In 1998, watching a Parkinson’s patient on American television, Baram felt driven to develop a portable, closed-loop visual and auditory apparatus for helping people with movement disorders, for which he received a US patent in 2004 (US patent No. 6,734,834-B-1, “Closed-loop Augmented Reality Apparatus”). Joining forces with leading neurological doctors in Israel and in the US, Baram spent the following years developing and testing his device in medical clinics on patients with Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Idiopathic Senile Gait, patients after Stroke and children with Cerebral Palsy, showing considerable movement improvement in most cases. He has written and published numerous articles in leading medical journals and in two recent books by World Scientific, “The Subcritical Brain” and “Motion Control.” He has received published honorary notifications by colleagues and by leading conferences. At the same time, he has investigated numerous observations on cortical operation from a mathematical perspective, published in leading scientific journals.