Brains and Machines

This latest episode of  Brains and Machines  features a panel discussion on neuromorphic engineering and physical computing held at the  Atoms to Bits: The AlphaBet of Intelligence v2.0  conference at the University of Manchester, held in February 2026. The panelists were  Dr. Damien Querlioz ,  Dr. Julian Büchel ,  Professor Tamalika Banerjee ,  Dr. Maxence Ernoult , and  Professor Steve Furber ,...

In this latest episode of  Brains and Machines , EE Times Senior Reporter Sally Ward-Foxton talks to Dr.  Sunny Bains  of the University College London. They discuss the importance of power in all AI systems, the benefit of having dedicated inference chips, and where neuromorphic fits into the market. Discussion follows with Dr.  Giulia D’Angelo  from the Czech Technical University in Prague and P...

In this latest episode of  Brains and Machines , Professor Rodolphe Sepulchre, a control theorist from the University of Cambridge, talks to Dr.  Sunny Bains  of the University College London. They discuss the inspiration he took from studying biological neurons, why both discrete and continuous behaviors are inherent to how they work, and why building neurons is often easier than simulating them....

Neuronova is an analog neuromorphic startup based in Milan, Italy. In this episode of  Brains and Machines , the CEO and CTO talk to Dr.  Sunny Bains  of University College London about their inference processor that idles at less than 10 nanowatts and what they hope to do with it. Discussion follows with Dr.  Giulia D’Angelo  from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Professor  Ralph Etie...

Professor  Chris Eliasmith  is a computer scientist and philosopher who’s been modelling cognitive systems for almost three decades. In this episode of  Brains and Machines , he talks to Dr.  Sunny Bains  of University College London about his neural engineering framework and the semantic pointer architecture his team have developed to implement it. Discussion follows with Dr.  Giulia D’Angelo  fr...

Dr.  Claudia Lenk’s  group creates brain-inspired hearing systems with micromechanical hair cells. In this episode of  Brains and Machines , she talks to Dr.  Sunny Bains  of University College London about the advantages of the approach and how it could be applied to speech processing in AI. Discussion follows with Dr.  Giulia D’Angelo  from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Professor ...

Sunny  talks to Dr  Brad Aimone  from Sandia National Laboratories who works with the world’s biggest neuromorphic platforms. He explains how this allows him to think deeply about what such platforms are good for and how we might be able to get to a theory of neuromorphic computational power. After the interview, discussion follows with  Giulia  and  Ralph .

Sunny  talks to Prof  Barbara Webb  from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland​, who uses physical robots to validate neural mechanisms in crickets, ants, and bees. She talks about her work inspired by the philosophy that biological cognition can only be truly understood by building complete sensory-motor loops that work in the real world. After the interview, discussion follows with  Giulia  an...

Professor Gert Cauwenberghs has been working toward building brain-scale systems for decades. At the University of California San Diego, he’s now one of the leaders of the  Neuromorphic Commons  hub, also known as Thor, which will give the wider community access to neuromorphic hardware and simulators. In this episode of  Brains and Machines , he talks to Dr.  Sunny Bains  of University College Lo...

Professor Gordon Cheng builds humanoid robots that can feel their environment using artificial skin. In this episode of  Brains and Machines , he talks to Dr.  Sunny Bains  of University College London about how the skin was designed, how it improves safety, and why neuromorphic engineering will be important for machine autonomy. Discussion follows with Dr.  Giulia D’Angelo  from the Czech Technic...

Dr. Charlotte Frenkel from the Technical University of Delft set records with a low-power neuromorphic chip she designed as part of her Ph. D. In this episode of  Brains and Machines , she talks to Dr.  Sunny Bains  of University College London about what she has learned about building simplicity into chips and integrity into benchmarks. Discussion follows with Dr.  Giulia D’Angelo  from the Czech...

Dharmendra Modha ’s TrueNorth chip added the word neuromorphic to the technorati lexicon back in 2014. In this episode of  Brains and Machines , he talks to Dr.  Sunny Bains  of University College London about how that project led to his work on NorthPole and the axiomatic approach he took to design. Discussion follows with Dr.  Giulia D’Angelo  from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Pr...

For 50 years Dr.  Terry Sejnowski  has modelled the brain and used his insights to help inform AI. In this episode of  Brains and Machines , he talks to Dr.  Sunny Bains  of the University College London about how information flows  both  ways between neuroscience and engineered intelligence, proposes a new way of looking at memory and considers the Hopfield-Hinton Nobel Prize. Discussion follows...

Dr.  Jennifer Hasler  of Georgia Tech is best known for her work with field programmable analog arrays (FPAAs). In this episode of  Brains and Machines , she talks about the importance of, and progress in, analog electronics for AI with Dr.  Sunny Bains  of the University College London. Discussion follows with Dr . Giulia D’Angelo  from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Professor  Ralp...

Tony Lewis, CTO for BrainChip, and four other key scientists talk to  Sunny Bains  of the University College London. They discuss their business strategy, their temporal event-based neural network (TENN), and the next iteration of the Akida chip. Discussion follows with  Giulia D’Angelo  from the Czech Technical University in Prague and  Ralph Etienne-Cummings  of Johns Hopkins University.

In this episode of Brains and Machines, emeritus Professor  Rodney Brooks  of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, currently CTO of Robust AI, talks about bottom-up and top-down approaches to robotics and AI with Dr.  Sunny Bains  of University College London. Discussion follows with Dr.  Giulia D’Angelo  from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Professor  Ralph Etienne-Cummings  of Joh...

In this new episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Katie Schuman of the University of Tennessee explains the advantages of evolutionary approaches in neural processing to Dr.   Sunny Bains of University College London. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University.

In this episode of Brains and Machines, UCL’s  Sunny Bains   talks to four key figures at Innatera , a spin out from the University of Delft in the Netherlands: Dr Petrut Bogdan, Neuromorphic Architect; Dr Amir Zjajo, Chief Scientific Officer; Vasile Toma, Vice President for Engineering; and Dr Sumeet Kumar, Chief Executive Officer. They are hoping that their latest spiking neural network chip wil...

In this episode of Brains and Machines, UCL’s  Sunny Bains  talks parallelism, neural net efficiency and risk taking with Caltech’s Prof.  Carver Mead . Now an emeritus professor, Mead has been instrumental in the development of chip design, and was one of the first employees of Noyce and Moore, which later became Intel. He’s also one of the founders of the field of neuromorphic engineering. Discu...

In this special episode of the  Brains and Machines  podcast, Dr.  Sunny Bains  and Dr.  Giulia D’Angelo  talk to four early career researchers: Dr. Kenneth Stewart, a computer scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC; Dr. Laura Kriener, a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Bern in Switzerland; Jens Pedersen, a Ph. D. student at The Royal Institute of Technology (...

In this episode of Brains and Machines , Dr. Sunny Bains talks to Dr. Dylan Muir, the head of research at SynSense. They discuss the company’s products, including Speck, Xylo, and Rockpool, some of the design choices that were made to bring these to market, and their recent acquisition of sister company IniVation. Discussion follows with Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in P...

In this episode of Brains and Machines , Dr.  Sunny Bains talks with Professor  Christian Mayr  from the Technical University of Dresden, who worked on SpiNNaker with Steve Furber for many years. He is taking that project into the future with SpiNNaker 2, which is mostly built, SpiNNaker 3, which is his next design project, and the startup  SpiNNcloud . Discussion follows with Dr.  Giulia D’Angelo...

In this episode of Brains and Machines , Dr. Elisa Donati of the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich talks to Dr.  Sunny Bains  about neuromorphic circuits for prosthetics, drug delivery, and more. Discussion follows with Dr.  Giulia D’Angelo  from the Czech Technical University in Prague , and Professor  Ralph Etienne-Cummings  of Johns Hopkins University.

In this episode of Brains and Machines , Dr. Sunny Bains discusses neuromorphic chips with Dr. Amirreza Yousefzadeh, who most recently worked at imec and the University of Twente. He has a broad background in electronics, starting with digital and then moving into neuromorphic, and he’s spent time both in industry and research. This sets him up neatly to work on hybrid AI SoCs. Discussion follows...

In this episode of Brains and Machines , Professor  Shih-Chii Liu , co-director of the Sensors Group at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI)—part of both the ETH and the University of Zurich, Switzerland—talks to Brains and Machines host, Dr.  Sunny Bains , about neuromorphic cochlea, sparsity and deep networks, and what it will take for the technology to solve real problems in industry. Discus...