Carver Mead Says Neuromorphic Efficiency Can Help AI

In this episode of Brains and Machines, UCL’s Sunny Bains 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. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo Marie Curie Fellow at The Czech Technical University in Prague, and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

In this episode of Brains and Machines, UCL’s Sunny Bains 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, and was one of the first employees of Noyce and Moore, which later became Intel. He’s also one of the founders of the field of neuromorphic engineering. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo Marie Curie Fellow at The Czech Technical University in Prague, and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

In this special episode of the Brains and Machines podcast, Dr. Sunny Bains and Dr. Giulia D’Angelo talk to four early career researchers: Dr. Kenneth Stewart, a computer scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC; Dr. Laura Kriener, a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Bern in Switzerland; Jens Pedersen, a Ph.D. student at The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden; and Dr. Fabrizio Ottati, an AI/ML computer architect at NXP Semiconductors in Hamburg, Germany. They discuss learning rules for spiking neural networks, primitives for computations on neuromorphic hardware, and the benefits and drawbacks of neuromorphic engineering.

In this episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Sunny Bains talks to Dr. Dylan Muir, the head of research at SynSense. They discuss the company’s products, 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 Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague, and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

In this episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Sunny Bains talks with Professor 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 Dr. Giulia D’Angelo Marie Curie Fellow at The Czech Technical University in Prague, and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

In this episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Elisa Donati of the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich talks to Dr. Sunny Bains about neuromorphic circuits for prosthetics, drug delivery, and more. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague, and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

In this episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Sunny Bains discusses neuromorphic chips with Dr. Amirreza Yousefzadeh, who 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 SoCs. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Fortiss research institute in Munich, and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

In this episode of Brains and Machines, Professor 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—talks to Brains and Machines host, Dr. Sunny Bains, about neuromorphic cochlea, sparsity and deep networks, and what it will take for the technology to solve real problems in industry. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague, and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

In this episode of Brains and Machines, Professor Emre Neftci, director of the Neuromorphic Software Ecosystems group at the Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI), talks to Brains and Machines host, Dr. Sunny Bains. He and his PGI 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.Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Fortiss research institute in Munich, and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Chiara Bartolozzi, head of the event-driven perception for the robotics group at the Italian Institute for Technology (IIT) in Genoa, develops analog sub-threshold circuits to make bio-inspired brains for robots. Her group focuses on exploiting information from event-driven vision and tactile sensors for cognitive tasks, and she works extensively with iCub: a research platform in the form of a robot child, developed in Italy and used throughout Europe.In this episode of Brains and Machines, you’ll hear her talk to Dr. Sunny Bains about 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.Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague, and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.