2024 CCNW Capocaccia Neuromorphic Workshop

today's authors:  Muhammad Aitsam &  Eleni Nisioti, edits by Tobi Delbruck Waking up to our first Saturday at Capocaccia and moving to a session different from others: commercializing our work.  We need to set aside our academic glasses and look at the world around us as a society of humans and an overall ecosystem that we want to help with our products.  Florian Engert set the stage by saying that commercialization often has two over-arching objectives:  Making useful products  Convincing people that we are making useful products by creating false needs or impressions of them. One example of this would be optimizing the search algorithms of websites such as YouTube or maximizing user clicks Florian felt the need to clarify that we need to keep this lecture solely considering the first. This is an important message of our community, as the landing page of our workshop exemplifies , quoting:  "The mission of the CapoCaccia Workshops for Neuromorphic Intelligence is to unde

                  Yesterday's hail (Photo credit: Yves Fregnac) today's authors:  Muhammad Aitsam,  Eleni Nisioti,  Tobi Delbruck To spike or not to spike, that seems to be the question for many neuromorphic-computing researchers but was actually not the theme that the speakers chose to address. Today's discussion may help us in our spiking-existential dread. Before starting the lecture, we were informed on the proper use of napkins: you can use them to clean yourself but not to draw your arguments during lunch discussions. So you have been warned for the rest of the workshop. Florian Engert confessed to be the one who instigated this kind request from the hotel. The lecture started with Mihai Petrovici  providing illustrations of how spiking neural networks can compute gradients.  Mihai said that they have two goals in mind:  one is to use ideas from mathematics, electronics etc to better understand the brain. For example it took the development of the electric motor to un