Professor Steve M. Potter

The PhysOrg article This is your grid on brains said

Managing power networks in the future may involve a little more brain power than it does today, if researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology succeed in a new project that involves literally tapping brain cells grown on networks of electrodes.
 
The Missouri S&T group, working with researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, plans to use the brain power to develop a new method for tracking and managing the constantly changing levels of power supply and demand.
 
Georgia Tech researchers involved in the project are Dr. Steve Potter, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and Dr. Ronald Harley, the Duke Power Co. Distinguished Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Computer and Electrical Engineering.
 
The Georgia Tech researchers, led by Potter, have developed living neural networks that can control simple robots, but this will be the first time anyone has attempted to tap the brain power to control more complex systems.

Steve M. Potter, Ph.D. is Associate Professor, Laboratory for NeuroEngineering, Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also Program Faculty for Emory University’s Neuroscience Graduate Program and Associate Editor of Frontiers in Neurorobotics.
 
Steve developed a new paradigm for neurobiology research, Embodied Cultured Networks, to study dissociated cultures of hundreds or thousands of mammalian neurons. He is especially interested in distributed activity patterns and information processing in these cultured networks.
 
He gives them a body, either simulated or robotic, and an environment in which to behave. He then uses new real-time feedback technology for 2-way communication between a computer and a cultured neural network. He is also using this technology in vivo, as a potential drug-free treatment for epilepsy.
 
His projects include:

• New Neuroscience Technology for Studying Learning In Vitro: The Animat in a Dish.
• Controlling epilepsy with multielectrode stimulation (in collaboration with Dr. Robert Gross at Emory).
• Multielectrode Array Recording and Stimulation of Cultured Neural Nets.
• 2-Photon time-lapse of morphological dynamics in dendritic spines.
• High-speed imaging of neural activity.
• Development of the mammalian olfactory system, a 2-photon imaging collaboration with Professor. Peter Mombaerts then at the Rockefeller University (now head of Molecular Neurogenetics at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt).
• Silicon Neuroprobe.

Steve is also interested in artificial intelligence, cognitive architectures, robotics, the scientific study of consciousness, the mechanisms of creativity, artificial life, artificial neural networks, self-organization, chaos, feedback systems, and complex dynamical systems (such as brains!).
 
Steve authored What can Artificial Intelligence get from Neuroscience?, Networking on the Volkscomputer: the Wave of the Future, The Meaning of “Life”, and Two-Photon Microscopy for 4D Imaging of Living Neurons, and coauthored Closing the Loop: Stimulation Feedback Systems for Embodied MEA Cultures. Advances in Network Electrophysiology Using Multi-Electrode Arrays and Removing some “A” from AI: Embodied Cultured Networks. His patents include Sealed culture chamber and High-speed CCD array camera with random pixel selection.
 
Steve earned his B.A. (cum laude) in Chemistry/Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego in 1987, and his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine in 1993.
 
Read Georgia Tech Researchers Use Lab Cultures To Control Robotic Device.