While building mammalian-sized whole brain systems is surely one of the most important research avenues in the new AI wave, with the promise of revolutionize both mobile robotics and more traditional data mining applications, much can be learned from isolating the functional principles encapsulated in small networks of neurons in non-mammalian species. Read the rest of this entry »

Neuromorphic engineers are studying the nervous system and trying to emulate its function and organization in their computational and robotics systems. They are hoping to match (or perhaps even exceed) the human brain in vision, hearing, pattern recognition and learning tasks (Boahen 2005). Read the rest of this entry »

Note: This posting summarizes some arguments I presented at the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Circuits and Systems. The complete presentation is available at this link.

In an earlier posting I presented arguments of why the idea of the memristor as a fourth fundamental circuit element is likely to be wrong. However, regardless of whether or not the memristor is considered as a fundamental circuit element, one may ask if it is technically correct to say that the researchers from HPLabs actually did discover a memristor. Read the rest of this entry »

If you had doubts before starting to read Neurdon, I think that by now you have come to the realization that there are as many neuroscientists that use computers than computer scientists that want to “use” neuroscience. This post is another example of the latter: Steve Furber, Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester and leader of the team that designed the the 32bit ARM microprocessor, is trying to build a large-scale neural simulator out of ARM processors. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Neural chips keep shrinking, but powering these chips still represents a challenge, especially for applications in the medical domain, such as neural prosthetics. A step towards the direction of reducing this issue has been recently taken by Brian Otis, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. Otis, the lead researcher on NeuralWISP, has designed a microprocessor powered by a commercial radio-frequency reader that doubles as a data-collection device. The circuitry converts usable power from the reader to a voltage that can be used to power the “neural” chip. More information is available here.

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 »

Top Gun taught us that the best and brightest pilots can perform some amazing aerobatics.  Nobody seems surprised that a good pilot, with some practice, can move seamlessly from the flight maneuvers used on a Boeing 747 to those featured in Blue Angels shows.  While computer autopilots have performed well in commercial aircraft for some time, however, getting an electronic computer to pull a plane successfully through an aerobatic maneuver is almost impossible, and is thus a relatively new field of research. Read the rest of this entry »

Marvin Minsky has decided to resuscitate AI from the 80’s ashes with a fresh $5M grant to support an MIT team in a “project to build intelligent machines”. More info here. I have strong doubts on Minsky’s approach, and the new Turing test: “can the computer read, understand, and explain a children’s book”. I would be satisfied with replicating the children…

A recent article on the WSJ (In Search for Intelligence, a Silicon Brain Twitches) reviews the Blue Brain project based at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The Blue Brian project, led for the last four years by Henry Markram, has focused in building a biologically accurate rat cortical column. Read the rest of this entry »