The research thesis was done under the supervision of Prof. Gideon Inbar and Dr. Ron Meir in the Department of Electrical Engineering.
The generous financial help of the Technion, as well as of The Jury family and The Wolf foundation is gratefully acknowledged.
I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Gideon Inbar for his dedicated guidance and warm support. Prof. Inbar introduced me to the world of biological motor control, and gave me the opportunity to broaden my horizon beyond human made engineering. I would like to thank Dr. Ron Meir for expanding my expertise in the mathematical fields of neural computation and learning theory. I learned a lot from his meticulous and modest approach. I would like to thank them both for their willingness to accept any idea and research direction I took, and for allowing me the great feeling of conducting a pure independent research. Nevertheless, reading this dissertation again, I cannot avoid noticing their fingerprints all over this work and I would like to thank them for that too.
Special thanks to Prof. Raphael Sivan who was willing to hear my proposal in a sequence of meetings at the beginning of my research. His pseudo naive questions forced me to phrase my ideas in a clear rigorous fashion.
I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. James Houk for a short
but quite beneficial meeting in a conference at Moscow, where he referred
me to the one fifth power law, which I found very useful, as described
in Chapter 4 of this thesis.
I am also very grateful to Prof. Tamar Flash, Prof. Dan Adam, Dr. Nahum
Shimkin, and Dr. David Starobinski, who enriched me with their support,
listening, and useful advice during the period of this research.
Finally, I wish to express my deep gratitude to my beloved family for
their unlimited support, to my wife Rinat, my mother Ilana, to Nitza and
Yuval, Bilha, Michal and Shula. This work is dedicated to them.