Dr. Rao is a researcher in the fields of computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and brain-computer interfacing. With Dana Ballard, he proposed the predictive coding model of brain function in 1999.[2] He has contributed to Bayesian models of perception and decision making. In brain-computer interfacing, Prof. Rao and his collaborators were the first to demonstrate direct brain control of a humanoid robot in 2007.[3][4]
In the first demonstration of human brain-to-brain communication in August 2013, Rao wearing an electrical brain-signal reading cap triggered the movement of his colleague Andrea Stocco's hand via the Internet, allowing their brains to cooperate to solve a computer game.[5] The demonstration was subsequently replicated across other pairs of humans,[6] and extended to other tasks,[7] and to a BrainNet for more than two brains.[8]
Rao also works on the decipherment of the Indus script.[9] By comparing the entropy of the Indus script with entropies of linguistic scripts such as those for Sumerian and Old Tamil, and nonlinguistic sequences such as DNA and a programming language, his work suggested that the Indus script behaves more like a linguistic script than nonlinguistic sequences.[10][11]
He has also given a TED talk on this topic where he backed the Dravidian hypothesis put forward by Iravatham Mahadevan.[12]
Rao is the author of the book Brain-Computer Interfacing (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and co-editor of two volumes, Probabilistic Models of the Brain (MIT Press, 2002) and Bayesian Brain (MIT Press, 2007). He has given a TEDx talk on "Brain co-processors: When AI meets the Brain."[13]
