2024 CCNW Capocaccia Neuromorphic Workshop

  today's authors:  Eleni Nisioti,  Muhammad Aitsam Writing today's blog after lunch Today's session kicked off with Yulia Sandamiskaya saying that robotics has not been as major a theme as it deserves in the lectures of the conference. She followed up with a bold statement: "All neuroscientists should do robotics".  This is motivated by the idea that, by taking into account the dynamics of robots that closely model reality, we can create neuroscientific models that are more true to the biology they try to represent. We, then, talked about a thought experiment from the work of Braitenberg (a major read according to many in the room) that exemplifies how you can reproduce real-like behavior with a minimal set of mechanisms (Yulia called this a physicist's approach) Picture a robot with two wheels that can turn left and right (like a tank), two motors controlling them and two sensors on its head that only receive the amount of light. There is a source of light ...

today's authors:  Eleni Nisioti,  Muhammad Aitsam,  Tobi Delbruck Giacomo has been collecting statistics on workshop participant interests:   After a weekend filled with a fancy dinner, a late-night venture to Alghero and a boat-trip along the Sardinian coastline, we return to the lecture room for the discussion that will probably contain the most equations. Our hotel seen from the boat We started off with a more theoretical/computational perspective and, then, switched to a more biological one. The first speaker, Rodolphe Sepulchre from KU Leuven (sitting to the right of Emre Neftci in photo above), who began by drawing a table with two columns: computation and adaptation. Rows were different examples from these two approaches. For example, the first row contained ChatGPT on one column and the smart grid on the other. These are examples of engineering systems that both work at large scale, but they do so differently. Rodolphe said ...

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 Neuromorphi...

                  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, electroni...

today's authors: Eleni Nisioti,  Muhammad Aitsam,  Tobi Delbruck Florian Engert setting off for morning run, big surf Today was probably the windiest morning so far, with surfable waves forming at the hotel beach. Quite appropriately in this Day 4 lecture we are going to talk about "riding the wave of Moore's law".  The lecture is titled "Neuromorphic Circuits: past, present and future" and Giacomo Indiveri from ETH Zurich is talking about the past (which made him realise the passage of time and ruminate over a jacuzzi invitation from his post-doc years in Switzerland). Giacomo said he will talk about two circuits. The first one is a simple MOSFET transistor: you apply some voltage between the Gate and the Source  and there is a current flow from the Drain to the Source. If we look at the relationship between the voltage and the current then we get this two-phase relationship we see on the left: there is a first phase where there is a linear relationship a...