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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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!