The US-sponsored DARPA SyNAPSE project and the EU-sponsored FACETS (now Brainscales) project are examples of major initiatives in neuromorphic computing. As for many other fields, the time has arrived for emerging (and soon to be dominating?) economies to start heavily funding similar projects. The "China brain project" is one of such early example. Read the rest of this entry »
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The China Brain Project
| March 25, 2011Comments: 11 Comments -
End of SyNAPSE Phase I presentation – Neuromorphics Lab
| March 19, 2011
This video presents the work performed by the Neuromorphics Lab for Phase I of the DARPA SyNAPSE project. The DARPA sponsored SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) project, launched in early 2009, is to investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in neuromorphic electronic devices that are scalable to biological levels. DARPA has awarded funds to three prime contractors: HP, HRL, and IBM. Members of the Neuromorphics Lab within the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University have worked in the past year with Information and Quantum Systems Lab at HP. This presentation is a summary of this work
Read the rest of this entry »Comments: 2 CommentsCategories: SyNAPSE -
The Neuromorphics Lab on Popular Science
| February 1, 2011
No, we have not invented the flying Humvee, and we are not about to. However, if you buy the February edition of Popular Science, you will find, on page 41, a nice overview of three projects, the Connectome, the Blue Brain, and SyNAPSE. These initiatives do not share the same goals, but can be all assimilated by the way they combine neuroscience and computer science to achieve their objectives. Read the rest of this entry »Comments: Leave a comment -
MoNETA IEEE article: a summary until now
| December 5, 2010
The online version of the IEEE Spectrum article describing our work on the MoNETA project (withing the DARPA SyNAPSE grant) has been out for a bit more than a week, and the story is starting to generate many comments and being picked up by blogs and magazines (see Slashdot and Popular Science). May be it's time to summarize what is happening, and starting to address the many comments related to the article. Ben and I will start a series of posts on the topic, this one being the first. Read the rest of this entry » -
Boston University Team SyNAPSE presentation, August DARPA site visit
| September 8, 2010
This post contains the videos of the Boston University team presentation during the recent DARPA SyNAPSE site visit occurred in August 2010, in Palo Alto. This presentation talks about the ongoing projects undertaken by the Boston University team in SyNAPSE since March 2010, with some of our most recent results and plans for the near future. Read the rest of this entry » -
The FACETS project
| March 27, 2010
The DARPA SyNAPSE project is not the only attempt in the world of neuromorphic engineering to create larg-scale, low-power neuromorphic hardware. The European FACETS (Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States) project, currently in his month 55 of activity, is "to create a theoretical and experimental foundation for the realisation of novel computing paradigms which exploit the concepts experimentally observed in biological nervous systems". Read the rest of this entry » -
What kind of robotics?
| March 22, 2010
In a recent post in Robotics Online, Jeff Burnstein discusses two possible, and equally likely, scenarios for the development of future robotic platforms: the Honda approach, and the GM approach. Read the rest of this entry »Comments: Leave a commentCategories: Robotics -
Robotics and memristors
| February 20, 2010
Patrick Cox is the author of a very interesting article on Contrarianprofits.com. In the post, Cox makes the case that the time is ripe for large-scale adoption of robotics in both civilian and military applications.The latter is old news: in previous posts, we looked at the growing opportunities, and concerns, of robotic applications in dangerous (or dangerously boring) domains. Read the rest of this entry » -
Plastic synapses in a stable brain
| February 2, 2010
One of the major themes in the SyNAPSE project is developing chips that can learn meaningful information, and preserve it over time. In other words: memristors can learn, but we need to ensure that they are stably learning something useful for the system they are embedded in. Some help to solve this technological problem comes from neuroscience. The question of how can the cerebral cortex develop stable memories while at the same time incorporating new information through an organism lifetime has been a central theme in many research groups. The talk posted on Neurdon describes one of these approaches. Read the rest of this entry »
Comments: Leave a commentCategories: Computing, NeurobiologyAlso tagged cortical column, learning, object recognition, spiking neurons, stdp, synaptic plasticity -
Cat fight over blue brain
| November 24, 2009
In my recent post, I commented on IBM's announcement at the Supercomputing Conference (SC09) in Portland, Ore., that they had simulated a brain with the number of neurons and synapses present in a cat's brain. It looks like the controversial statement of IBM being finally able to "simulate a cat's brain" (or however their original statements has been distorted) has been stirring some more comments. Henry Markram, the leader of the Blue Brain project at EPFL, Lausanne, sent an open letter to IBM CTO Bernard Meyerson, along with several media (UK Daily Mail, Die Zeit, Wired, Discover, Forbes). One big question is: was Modha's statement somehow distorted? Did he actually simply claim that IBM simulated a system that has the same number of neurons of a cat, as opposed to simulate "the cat's brain?". This is an important distinction. Anyway, Neurdons must know, so here it is! Enjoy!
