Eric L. Schwartz

This article has an unclear citation style. The references used may be made clearer with a different or consistent style of citation and footnoting. (February 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Eric L. Schwartz (1947 – December 31, 2018)^[1] was Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems,^[2] Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering,^[3] and Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology^[4] at Boston University. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Psychiatry at New York University Medical Center and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.

He introduced the term Computational Neuroscience through the organization of a conference with this title which took place in Carmel California in 1985, under the sponsorship of the Systems Development Foundation. Encouraged by program director Charles Smith, this conference, whose proceedings were later published by MIT Press(1990), provided a summary of progress in the related fields which were till then referred to as neural networks, neural modeling, brain theory, theoretical neuroscience and a variety of other terms. Organizing these fields along the dimensions of spatial and temporal measurement, the conference, and its later publication in book form, introduced the use of the term "Computational Neuroscience". In the subsequent decades, dozens of University Departments and Programs have adopted this umbrella title.

During the late 1980s Schwartz founded the Computational Neurosciences Labs, with support from the Systems Development Foundation, and then Vision Applications, Inc. in 1990, with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for the purpose of developing actuators, sensors and algorithms for miniaturized space-variant vision systems. Patents developed at Vision Applications included a novel spherically actuated motor [1] Archived 2010-07-26 at the Wayback Machine, a CMOS VLSI log-plar sensor prototype [2] Archived 2010-07-26 at the Wayback Machine and algorithms for real-time synthesis of space-variant images [3] Archived 2008-07-25 at the Wayback Machine.

This work culminated in the construction of a miniature autonomous vehicle which was the first vehicle to drive, unassisted by human backup, on the streets of Boston (1992) [4] Archived 2007-07-02 at the Wayback Machine.