Sunny talks parallelism, neural net efficiency, and risk taking with Caltech’s Prof Carver Mead. Now an Emeritus Professor, Mead has been instrumental in the development of chip design. He worked with Lynn Conway to start the VLSI chip revolution and was one of the first employees of Noyce and Moore, which later became Intel. As well as being a close collaborator with people like Gordon Moore, John Hopfield, and Richard Feynman, he, with Misha Mahowald, helped create the field that we now know as neuromorphic engineering. Read More ...

Left to right then top to bottom: Kenneth Stewart, Laura Kriener, Jens Pedersen, and Fabrizio Ottati. Listen and read transcript at EETimes.com Sunny and Giulia talk to four early career researchers: Dr Kenneth Stewart, a Computer Scientist at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC; Dr Laura Kriener, a Postdoctoral Researcher at The University of Read More ...

Sunny discusses neuromorphic chips with to the Vice President of Global Research Operations and Program Manager  at SynSense, Dr Dylan Muir. They discuss the company’s products for low-power vision and other sensor processing – including Speck, Xylo, and Rockpool – some of the design choices that were made to bring these to market, and their recent acquisition of sister company IniVation. Discussion follows with Giulia and Ralph. Read More ...

Sunny talks with Prof. Christian Mayr from the Technical University of Dresden, who worked on SpiNNaker with Steve Furber for many years. He is taking that project into the future with SpiNNaker 2—which is mostly built—SpiNNaker 3, which is his next design project, and the startup SpiNNcloud. Discussion follows with Giulia and Ralph. Read More ...

Sunny talks to Dr Elisa Donati of the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich about biomedical uses for neuromorphic engineering, particularly providing an interface between electronics and the body. They discuss different kinds of interactions that are possible through the nervous system, why spiking networks may be more compatible with biological systems than their conventional counterparts, and a little about the trade-off between network size and neuron complexity. Read More ...

Sunny discusses neuromorphic chips with Dr Amirreza Yousefzadeh who has most recently worked at Imec and the University of Twente. He has a broad background in electronics, starting with digital and then moving into neuromorphic, and he's spent time both in industry and research. This sets him up neatly to work on hybrid AI systems-on-a-chip. Discussion follows with Giulia and Ralph. Read More ...

In this episode Sunny talks to Dr Shih-Chii Liu, co-director of the Sensors Group at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI)—part of both the ETH and the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Shih-Chii is a researcher with more than three decades in neuromorphic engineering. She has helped build the field, through her direct research and teaching, but also through her helping to lead community-building projects like the Telluride and Capo Caccia workshops. Read More ...

In this episode Sunny talks to Prof Emre Neftci, Director of the Neuromorphic Software Ecosystems group at the Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI). He and his colleagues, part of the Jülich Research Centre in Germany, think about how neurons can be trained and organized to learn in an efficient and brain-inspired way. You'll hear about his work in making backpropagation compatible with spiking neural networks, dealing with device variability, and one- and few-shot learning. Read More ...

In this episode, Sunny talks to Dr Chiara Bartolozzi, head of the Event-Driven Perception for Robotics group at the Italian Institute for Technology in Genoa. They discuss how neuromorphic technology can be used to implement attention mechanisms, the importance of embodiment, and why we need a solid theory of how neural systems can work together to create intelligence. Read More ...

Sunny talks to Dr Tobi Delbrück, one of the original neuromorphic engineers from Carver Mead's team at Caltech. Now a professor at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich, he has spent his career developing neuromorphic cameras and other technology. You'll find out how he got started in the field, his work developing the dynamic vision sensor, also known as an event camera, and the pros and cons of sparse representations. Read More ...

Sunny gets deep into nanoscale ferroelectrics with Professor Beatriz Noheda, Director of the Groningen Cognitive Systems and Materials Center. They discuss how this unusual interdisciplinary research center works, why nanoscale ferroelectrics may be useful in brain-like systems, and a little about how they are designed and fabricated. Discussion follows with Giulia and Ralph. Read More ...

Giulia talks to Simeon Bamford, a researcher who works on tactile neuromorphic sensors at the Italian Institute of Technology. They talk about creating circuits to perform functions lost to brain damage, Bamford’s involvement with the commercialisation of Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS), and his latest research on robotic touch. Discussion follows with Sunny and Ralph. Read More ...

Sunny talks to Professor Melika Payvand who designs neural systems from the circuit-level up at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich. They discuss the role that memristors play in the systems she designs, why neural circuits need to operate at different timescales, and how copying some features of biological dendrites could add computational power to silicon brains. Read More ...

Sunny talks to now Emeritus Professor Steve Furber as he prepares to leave the University of Manchester. They talk about associative memories, the original SpiNNaker neural simulator designed using densely-interconnected ARM cores, and the new generation of the technology currently being assembled. Read More ...

Giulia talks to Dr Guillermo Gallego: Professor of Robotic Interactive Perception at the Technical University of Berlin, the Einstein Center Digital Future and the Science of Intelligence Excellence Cluster, Germany. They discuss the new generation of bioinspired event-driven cameras, the vision algorithms behind them and why they can be appealing from an application point of view. Read More ...

Sunny talks to Dr Yulia Sandamirskaya, who has just created the Neuromorphic Computing Group at Zurich University of Applied Sciences. They discuss the role that dynamical systems theory plays in robotics, her work at with Intel’s Loihi platform, and what she plans to do in her new position at ZHAW, particularly related to vision. Read More ...

Sunny talks to Professor Giacomo Indiveri, a stalwart neuromorphic engineer based at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich, Switzerland. You’ll learn how he sees the trade-offs between analog and digital in the marketplace, the chips he has in the lab and on the drawing board, and — as a purist — the evolution of the term neuromorphic. Read More ...

Sunny talks to Dr Mitra Hartmann: Professor of both Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University, and head of their Sensory and Neural Engineering Group. They discuss why how modelling rat whiskers can make us better both at understanding the brain and building technology, and why she is finds the neuromorphic engineering community so intellectually rewarding. Read More ...

Sunny talks to Professor Elisabetta Chicca, head of the Bio-inspired Circuits and Systems Group at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. They discuss building neural chips with memristors, adding electronic brains to neural robots, some of the current difficulties with learning algorithms for spiking systems and more. Read More ...

Sunny interviews Professor André van Schaik, Director of the International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems at Western Sydney University. They talk about about how neuromorphic engineering has changed since the early ’90s, a new project to help simulate neural and neuromorphic models, and more. Read More ...