Contributions of parietal cortex to reach planning

Sensory-motor circuits course through the parietal cortex of the human and monkey brain. How parietal cortex manipulates these signals has been an important question in behavioral neuroscience. This thesis presents experiments that explore the contributions of monkey parietal cortex to sensory-motor processing, with an emphasis on the area's contributions to reaching. First, it is shown that parietal cortex is organized into subregions devoted to specific movements. Area LIP encodes plans to make saccadic eye movements. A nearby area, the parietal reach region (PRR), plans reaches. A series of experiments are then described which explore the contributions of PRR to reach planning. Reach plans are represented in an eye-centered reference frame in PRR. This representation is shown to be stable across eye movements. When a sequence of reaches is planned, only the impending movement is represented in PRR, showing that the area is more related to movement planning than to storing the memory of reach targets. PRR resembles area LIP in each of these properties: the two areas may provide a substrate for hand-eye coordination. These findings yield new perspectives on the functions of the parietal cortex and on the organization of sensory-motor processing in primate brains.

An integrated design approach to power systems : from power flows to electricity markets

Power system is at the brink of change. Engineering needs, economic forces and environmental factors are the main drivers of this change. The vision is to build a smart electrical grid and a smarter market mechanism around it to fulfill mandates on clean energy. Looking at engineering and economic issues in isolation is no longer an option today; it needs an integrated design approach. In this thesis, I shall revisit some of the classical questions on the engineering operation of power systems that deals with the nonconvexity of power flow equations. Then I shall explore some issues of the interaction of these power flow equations on the electricity markets to address the fundamental issue of market power in a deregulated market environment. Finally, motivated by the emergence of new storage technologies, I present an interesting result on the investment decision problem of placing storage over a power network. The goal of this study is to demonstrate that modern optimization and game theory can provide unique insights into this complex system. Some of the ideas carry over to applications beyond power systems.