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Sam Burden

Associate Professor
Robotics and Controls, Biosystems, Data Science
M442 ECE
Campus Box 352500
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
Phone: 206-221-3545
Email: sburden@ece.uw.edu
Research Web Page: faculty.washington.edu/sburden


Biography

Sam Burden earned his BS with Honors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2008. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California in Berkeley in 2014, where he subsequently spent one year as a Postdoctoral Scholar. In 2015, he returned to UW EE (now ECE) as an Assistant Professor, where he received awards for research (Young Investigator Program, Army Research Office, 2016; CAREER, National Science Foundation, M3X program, 2021) and service (Junior Faculty Award, UW College of Engineering, 2021). Sam served as his Department’s (first) Associate Chair for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in 2021–2022 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2022. He is broadly interested in discovering and formalizing principles of sensorimotor control. Specifically, he focuses on applications in robotics, neuroengineering, and (human-)cyber-physical systems. Sam lives with chronic illness, and is happy to meet with anyone who identifies as disabled or chronically ill.

Awards and Honors

Recent Publications

M. Yamagami, M. Madduri, B. J. Chasnov, A. H. Y. Chou, L. N. Peterson, and S. A. Burden. Co-adaptation improves performance in a dynamic human-machine interface. Submitted; under review, July 2023. [ bib | DOI | code | .pdf ]

B. J. Chasnov, L. J. Ratliff, and S. A. Burden. Human adaptation to adaptive machines converges to game-theoretic equilibria. Submitted; under review, May 2023, arXiv:2305.01124. [ bib | arXiv | code | .pdf ]

M. M. Madduri, S. A. Burden, and A. L. Orsborn. Biosignal-based co-adaptive user-machine interfaces for motor control. Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering 27:100462, apr 2023. [ bib | DOI | .pdf ]

A. H. Y. Chou, M. Yamagami, and S. A. Burden. Evaluating a Human/Machine interface with redundant motor modalities for Trajectory-Tracking. IFAC Workshop on Cyber-Physical-Human Systems (CPHS), vol. 55, pp. 125--130, no. 41, Jan. 2022. [ bib | DOI | .pdf ]

M. M. Madduri, M. Yamagami, A. X. T. Millevolte, S. J. Li, S. N. Burckhardt, S. A. Burden, and A. L. Orsborn. Co-adaptive myoelectric interface for continuous control. IFAC Workshop on Cyber-Physical-Human Systems (CPHS), vol. 55, pp. 95--100, no. 41, Jan. 2022. [ bib | DOI | .pdf ]

L. N. Peterson, A. H. Y. Chou, S. A. Burden, and M. Yamagami. Assessing human feedback parameters for Disturbance-Rejection. IFAC Workshop on Cyber-Physical-Human Systems (CPHS), vol. 55, pp. 1--6, no. 41, Jan. 2022. [ bib | DOI | .pdf ]

M. M. Madduri, S. A. Burden, and A. L. Orsborn. A game-theoretic model for co-adaptive brain-machine interfaces. IEEE Conference on Neural Engineering (NER), May 2021. [ bib | DOI | .pdf ]

Students

PhD students (current)

PhD students (former)

MS students (former)

  • Jake Baldassini (next step: Officer in the US Coast Guard)
  • Liam Han (next step: Robotics Engineer at Amyris, Inc)
  • Tianqi Li (next step: PhD student at Texas A&M)
  • Yana Sosnovskaya (next step: PhD student at UW ECE)