Brains and Machines

Tony Lewis, CTO for BrainChip, and four other key scientists talk to Sunny Bains of the University College London. They discuss their business strategy, their temporal event-based neural network (TENN), and the next iteration of the Akida chip. Discussion follows with Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

In this episode of Brains and Machines, emeritus Professor Rodney Brooks of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, currently CTO of Robust AI, talks about bottom-up and top-down approaches to robotics and AI with Dr. Sunny Bains of University College London. 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 new episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Katie Schuman of the University of Tennessee explains the advantages of evolutionary approaches in neural processing to Dr.  Sunny Bains of University College London. 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, 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.

In this episode of the Brains and Machines podcast, Sunny Bains 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. In this interview, 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.

In this episode of Brains and Machines, Sunny Bains gets deep into nanoscale ferroelectrics with Professor Beatriz Noheda, director of the Groningen Cognitive Systems and Materials Center (CogniGron). 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.

In this episode of the Brains and Machines podcast, Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Italian Institute of Technology interviews her IIT colleague, Dr. Simeon Bamford, who is currently working on tactile neuromorphic sensors. They talk about creating circuits to perform functions lost to brain damage, Bamford’s involvement with the commercialization of dynamic vision sensors, and his latest research on robotic touch. Discussion follows with Dr. Sunny Bains of University College London, and Prof. Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

In the latest episode of Brains and Machines, EE Times regular Dr. Sunny Bains talks to Professor Melika Payvand, who designs neural systems from the circuit-level up at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich. You’ll find out the role that memristors are playing in the systems she designs, why neural circuits need to operate at different timescales, and why copying some features of biological dendrites could add computational power to silicon brains. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings from Johns Hopkins University.

In this latest episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Sunny Bains interviews 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. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings from Johns Hopkins University.

In this episode of the Brains and Machines podcast, Dr. Giulia D’Angelo, from the Czech Technical University in Prague, talks to Professor Guillermo Gallego, from the Technical University of Berlin. They discuss the application of the new generation of bio-inspired, event-driven cameras and their algorithms to extract cues of motion, depth and optical flow estimation. After that, Giulia discusses the interview with Dr. Sunny Bains from the University College London and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings from Johns Hopkins University.

In this episode of the Brains and Machines podcast, Sunny Bains talks to Dr Yulia Sandamirskaya, who has just created the Neuromorphic Computing Group at Zurich University of Applied Sciences. We discuss the role that dynamical systems theory plays in robotics, her work with Intel’s Loihi platform, and what she plans to do in her new position at ZHAW, particularly related to vision. After that, Sunny discusses the interview with Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Ralph Etienne-Cummings from Johns Hopkins University.