ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and most, I express my sincere gratitude to my Ph.D. advisor Dr. Jose Principe for his encouraging and inspiring style that made possible the completion of this work. Without his guidance, imagination, and enthusiasm, passion, which I admire, this dissertation would not have been possible. His philosophy on autonomous thinking and the importance of asking for good questions, molded me into an independent researcher from a Ph.D. student. I also thank my committee member Dr. Murali Rao for his great help and valuable discussions on reproducing kernel Hilbert space. His mathematical rigor refines this dissertation. I express my sincere appreciation to Dr. John M. Shea for serving as my committee member and taking time to criticize, proofread and improve the quality of this dissertation. I thank my committee member Dr. K. Clint Slatton for providing me valuable comments and constructive advice. I am also grateful to Dr. Andrzej Cichocki from the Laboratory for Advanced Brain Signal Processing in RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan for his guidance and words of wisdom during my summer school there. The collaboration with Dr. Andrzej Cichocki, Hovagim Bakardjian and Dr. Tomasz Rutkowski made the chapter 8 possible in this dissertation. I thank all of them for their great help and insightful discussions on biomedical signal processing. The hospitality in the lab made my stay in Japan a memorable and wonderful experience. During my course on Ph.D. research, I interacted with many CNEL colleagues and I benefited from the valuable discussions on research and life at large. Especially, I than