Born in Kerala, India, I was originally trained in the field of Microelectronics and VLSI design at IIT Madras and began my scientific career playing with neuromorphic VLSI models of associative memories. While memory is the capacity of the nervous system to benefit from experience, to gain experience there is a need for physical interactions between the body and the world, coupled with mechanisms that abstract useful information in such interactions and organize them into our memories.

  This resulted in my parallel research training (PhD) in the field of cognitive robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology, where I have been a learning/playing partner to the humanoid iCub since its inception: helping it to gradually expand its cognitive horizons and at the same time trying to understand the computational principles that endow us with similar capabilities. This road has since lead to my cross domain research on action, affordance, memory and social cognition supported by a string of interdisciplinary EU funded projects where I have contributed at different levels, from author/PI to work package leader and PhD student.

   The ensuing experiences have enabled me to cross paths with several passionate teachers and other inspirational cross discipline collaborators, students. I have been a reviewer for the prestigious European Research Council starting grant (2014), and presently serve as reviewer, guest editor in several major journals in the field of robotics, neural networks and neurosciences. At leisure, I am a student of both the history of science and art and inspired by the works of Boltzmann,Dali, Feynman, M C Escher and innovative eastern thinkers like Adi Shankara, OSHO Rajneesh. From a long term perspective, I am curious to understand the fundamental principles that underlie transformations between three major forms of causality in nature: the physical, the neural and the mental.