We are very pleased to announce the recipient of the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences Seed Grant Award for 2014-2015. Dr. Per Sederberg has been awarded for his proposal titled: SMILE: State Machine Interface Library for Experiments

The purpose of the CCBS seed grant is to enable members of the Center to develop tangible resources (i.e., software packages, data bases, data archives, virtual machines, etc) that can be shared by the research community at OSU and at large.  The seed award for this proposal is $75,000 in the first year.

Congratulations to Per Sederberg for this exceptional achievement!

SMILE: State Machine Interface Library for Experiments

SMILE (State Machine Interface Library for Experiments) is a new experimental programming library under active development within the Computational Memory Lab at Ohio State (http://memory.osu.edu). SMILE differs from existing experimental programming libraries in a number of key ways. Most importantly, SMILE conceptualizes experiments as hierarchical state machines in essence, as systems that occupy one or more nested states at a time with each state performing some action relevant to the experiment (for a simple example of a state machine, consider a traffic light, which can exist in one of three states at any given time, with a specific order for traversing from one state to the next). Thinking of experiments as hierarchical state machines is a powerful and intuitive approach to design, and greatly simplifies a number of tasks in the experimental design pipeline.