Tom Erez's homepage

Welcome to my home page!

I am a postdoc at the University of Washington-Seattle (UW). I am a member of Emanuel Todorov's lab, and I'm co-advised by Tom Daniel. My goal is to generate locomotion from first principles (see below) in biomechanically-realistic simulations. My post-doc position was awarded by the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Scholars Program in Integrative Biophysics, so I'm also a member of the Physiology and Biophysics department. I recently completed my doctoral studies at Media and Machines lab in the computer science department, Washington University in St. Louis.

I study motor control; in particular, I use nonlinear, non-convex optimization algorithms to generate novel motion from first principles (e.g., move forward, get up, avoid turning). I seek ways to train my simulated agents to perform complex, articulated motor tasks which they discover on their own, without hard-coding the details of the motion.

Here are some cool results from my thesis:

I often use OpenSim for biomechanical simulations, and I recently built a MATLAB interface for it. With my help, Matt Kusner (a first-year graduate student at WUSTL) has created a python version of DDP (for the MATLAB version Yuval Tassa and I are maintaining, see here).