kaushikghose
Postdoctoral associate, Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
email kaushik_ghose .at. hms.harvard.edu
mail
Kaushik Ghose
Neurobiology
Harvard Medical School
220 Longwood Avenue
Boston, MA 02115, USA

degrees and positions

Post Doc, Harvard Medical School, Neurobiology, Boston, MA, USA [maunsell lab]
Post Doc, Institute for Systems Research, Univ. Maryland, College Park, USA [batlab, CSSL, ISL]
Ph.D.in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, Univ. Maryland, College Park, USA [batlab]
M.S in Systems Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
B.E. in Electrical Engineering, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India

research

I want to know how brains work.

I am currently interested in understanding integrative processes in the brain. From past study we know that sensory information and internal states are represented in the activity of groups of neurons spread all over cortex. I'm interested in knowing how the brain picks out and then combines together spatially disparate groups of neurons that are important for a given behavioral task. 

For my doctoral degree I investigated target pursuit behavior in echolocating bats [learn more...].

For my masters degree I worked on, among other things, acoustic echo cancellers for telecommunication [learn more...]. 

outreach

I love sharing my joy of science with others.
I wrote this piece on bats on invitation from Imagine magazine. It is meant for a lay audience.
I wrote this piece on my student life in Maryland on invitation from the International Society for Neuroethology for the society newsletter.
I have judged several science fairs, and have been to several elementary and middle schools in Maryland with my PhD. advisor Cynthia Moss to talk about bats.

publications

bat echolocation and flight behavior

Echolocating bats fly around in darkness emitting ultrasonic sounds and listening for the echoes that return from things like tasty insects flying nearby. The bats use the echo information to locate the insects and chase them with breathtaking high speed maneuvers. I was interested in knowing what kind of computations the bat's brain may be doing in order to turn sensory information into a flight strategy. I designed and built apparatus to measure the sonar beam patterns of flying bats. I made observations of bat flight behavior and mathematically modeled the flight strategies they use to capture insects. I showed how the bat's acoustic gaze (where it directs its sonar beam) is related to its flight pattern and may be used to gain insight into what the bat is planning. I also showed how the bat optimizes its flight strategy to chase unpredictably moving insects in order to improve its chances of a quick, successful capture.
[With Cynthia F. Moss, Timothy K. Horiuchi, P.S. Krishnaprasad, Jeffrey D. Triblehorn and David D. Yager]

Kaushik Ghose, Jeffrey D. Triblehorn, Kari Bohn, David D. Yager and Cynthia F. Moss (2009) Behavioral responses of big brown bats to dives by praying mantises. J. Exp. Biol. 212,693 -703. (fulltext, pdf)

We got featured in the "Inside JEB" section with this blurb!

Kaushik Ghose, Timothy K. Horiuchi and Cynthia F. Moss (2007)  Flying big brown bats emit a beam with two lobes in the vertical plane. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 122(2), 3717-3724. (pdf)

Kaushik Ghose (2006)  Sonar Beam Direction and Flight Control in an Echolocating Bat. PhD. Thesis (pdf)

Kaushik Ghose, Timothy K. Horiuchi, P.S. Krishnaprasad and Cynthia F. Moss  (2006) Echolocating bats use a nearly time-optimal strategy to intercept prey. Public Library of Science: Biology, 4(5), (pdf)

The idea that bats use a parallel navigation strategy similar to guided missiles made for good copy on The HinduScience Daily and other parts of the internet.

Kaushik Ghose and Cynthia F. Moss (2006) Steering by Hearing: A Bat’s Acoustic Gaze Is Linked to Its Flight Motor Output by a Delayed, Adaptive Linear Law. Journal of Neuroscience, 26(6), 1704-1710. (pdf) Supplementary video S1, S2 , Publicity video.

Discovery channel interviewed me as part of a short piece on the Steering by Hearing paper on February 9th 2006.

Kaushik Ghose and Cynthia F. Moss (2003) The sonar beam pattern of a flying bat as it tracks moving and stationary prey. Journal of the Acoustical society of America, 114(2), 1120-1131. (pdf) Beam pattern animations

The sonar beam animations gained notoriety by winning first prize (non interactive media) in the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge hosted by Science magazine and the NSF. The word diptych, if you wondered like I did, means any object with two flat plates attached at a hinge.

acoustic echo cancellers

When you speak to someone who is using a speaker phone, or when you chat with some one else who is not using headphones, you can often get an annoying echo of your own voice. This occurs because whatever you say gets broadcast into the other person's room, bounces around, gets picked up by their mike, and then gets played back to you along with whatever the other person is saying. This feedback can get extremely annoying. Acoustic echo cancellers are clever devices that try and estimate the 'room transfer function' of some one else's room. They try to estimate, based on whatever you just said, what the echo of that will sound like as it gets fed back to you. This estimate is then subtracted from the sound being fed to your speakers/headphones so that you will only hear the other person's voice, and not the echo of your own voice.
  [with VU Reddy]

Kaushik Ghose and V. Umapathi Reddy (2000) A double-talk detector for acoustic echo cancellation applications. Signal Processing, 80 (8), 1459-1467. (pdf)

Kaushik Ghose (1999)  A double-talk detector for acoustic echo cancellation applications. Masters Thesis. (pdf)

software

NeuraPy neuraPy logo A collection of python modules for data analysis. Currently includes
PyLablib a python module to read lablib datafiles
PyNev [BETA] a python module to read Cerebus datafiles (.nev and .ns3)
RRiki rriki logo A research notes and references organizer
Chhobi chhobi logo A picture organizing program

Current analysis toolchain

python, matplotlib, parallelpython, mencoder, inkscape, lyx
Last Updated: Nov 2009