Neuromorphic technology has several applications, ranging from pattern recognition to robotics. One of the most interesting application domain is neural prosthetics. This is a fascinating twist on the idea of “borrowing” from biology: designing chips inspired by the nervous systems, which are then implanted back in a living organism to restore lost functions. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times published an article this Monday on I.B.M.’s bid to have their Watson computer system compete in a number of televised Jeopardy! episodes, a move reminiscent of the famous set of chess matches between I.B.M.’s Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov. Reading the entire report may take some time but is definitely worthwhile for anyone who’s never heard a description of the set of problems involved in building such a computer system. Read the rest of this entry »

In the past few years a lot of attention has been directed to “memristors” as a new type of memory cell and as a new component for neuromorphic electronic designs. However, currently most proposed neuromorphic designs do not yet use the 2-terminal memristive devices promoted by Leon Chua and HP but rather use more conventional electronic circuit components such as the floating gate memory cells used in Flash memory. Read the rest of this entry »

Leo Chua gave one of his brilliant talks on May 21, 2010 at the ICCNS 2010 conference at the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems. Just to be sure you get the magnitude of the event: Leon Chua is the first to theorize the existence of memristors with his paper “Memristor: The Missing Circuit Element” on IEEE TRANSACTIONS on Circuit Theory, published in September 1971. Read the rest of this entry »