Author: Sunny Bains

Sunny talks to Prof Gert Cauwenberghs, who has been working towards building brain-scale systems for decades. At the University of California at San Diego, he’s now one of the leaders of the Neuromorphic Commons hub, also known as Thor, which will give the wider community access to neuromorphic hardware and simulators. Here he talks about his approach to making systems that use minimal energy, are highly-interconnected at all levels, and surprisingly flexible. Read More …

Sunny talks to Prof Gordon Cheng, Professor of Cognitive Systems at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, who builds humanoid robots that can feel their environment using artificial skin. In this episode he talks about how the skin was designed, how it improves safety, and why neuromorphic engineering will be important for machine autonomy. After the interview, discussion follows with Giulia and Ralph. Read More …

Sunny talks to Dr Charlotte Frenkel from the Technical University of Delft. Charlotte set records with a low-power neuromorphic chip she designed as part of her PhD. In this episode of Brains and Machines she talks to Dr Sunny Bains of University College London about what she’s learned about building simplicity into chips and integrity into benchmarks. Read More …

Sunny talks to Dr Dharmendra Modha, who has pioneered neuromorphic computing at IBM for nearly three decades. He brought the concept of neuromorphic engineering to the wider technical community through his TrueNorth chips and has continued to push field forward. His latest advance, the North Pole inference system, demonstrates remarkable energy efficiency: 75 times more efficient than traditional GPUs. Read More …

Sunny talks to Dr Terry Sejnowski, who has modelled the brain and used his insights to help inform AI for almost 50 years. He has been involved with neuromorphic engineering since its inception and made fundamental contributions to both neuroscience and engineering. These include demonstrating the importance of precise spike timing in the cortex, and the development of the Boltman machine. In this episode, he explains how information flows both ways between neuroscience and engineered intelligence, proposes a new way of looking at memory, and considers the Hopfield-Hinton Nobel Prize.  Read More …

Sunny talks to Dr Jennifer Hasler of Georgia Tech, best known for her work with field programmable analog arrays (FPAAs). She’s been developing this analog technology to run spiking neural networks for more than two decades and is now looking to make that technology more accessible to the wider community through her group’s new Python-based analog synthesis tools. Read More …

Sunny talks to Brainchip Chief Technology Officer Dr Tony Lewis, Research Scientist Yan Ru (Rudy) Pei; Senior Research Scientist Olivier Coenen, and Chief Development Officer and Vice President of Engineering, Jon Tapson. They discuss Brainchip’s business strategy, describe their temporal event-based neural networks (TENNs) in detail, and preview the next iteration of the Akida chip. Read More …

Sunny talks to Emeritus Professor Rodney Brooks of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, currently CTO of Robust AI, about bottom-up and top-down approaches to robotics and AI. Brooks has been a force in robotics since the 1980s, when he first started to question the status quo of top-down, planning-based AI in favor of more biologically-based approaches. In 1990 he issued a rallying cry for a new generation of roboticists in the form of a paper called Elephants Don’t Play Chess. Since then, he not only rose to be head of the Computer Science and AI Lab at MIT Read More …

Sunny talks to Dr Katie Schuman of the University of Tennessee about the advantages of evolutionary approaches in neural processing. Until the last couple of years, Katie worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory focusing on evolutionary optimization, deep learning, data analytics, and of course, neuromorphic computing. Among many other things, Katie is an organizer of ICONS, the International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems. After the interview, discussion follows with Giulia and Ralph. Read More …

Sunny talks to four key figures at Innatera, a spin out from the University of Delft in the Netherlands: Dr Petrut Bogdan, Neuromorphic Architect; Dr Amir Zjajo, Chief Scientific Officer; Vasile Toma, Vice President for Engineering; and Dr Sumeet Kumar, Chief Executive Officer. They are hoping that their latest spiking neural network chip will become AI of choice for people working on sensor applications. Read More …