Brains and Machines

In this episode of Brains and Machines , Professor Emre Neftci, director of the Neuromorphic Software Ecosystems group at the Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI), talks to Brains and Machines host, Dr.  Sunny Bains . He and his PGI colleagues, part of the Jülich Research Centre in Germany, think about how neurons can be trained and organized to learn in an efficient and brain-inspired way. You’ll hear...

Dr.  Chiara Bartolozzi , head of the  event-driven perception for the robotics  group at the Italian Institute for Technology (IIT) in Genoa, develops analog sub-threshold circuits to make bio-inspired brains for robots. Her group focuses on exploiting information from event-driven vision and tactile sensors for cognitive tasks, and she works extensively with iCub: a research platform in the form...

In this episode of the Brains and Machines podcast, Sunny Bains  talks to  Dr. Tobi Delbrück , one of the original neuromorphic engineers from Carver Mead’s team at Caltech. Now a professor at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich, he has spent his career developing neuromorphic cameras and other technology. In this interview, you’ll find out how he got started in the field, his work develop...

In this episode of Brains and Machines , Sunny Bains  gets deep into nanoscale ferroelectrics with  Professor Beatriz Noheda , director of the Groningen Cognitive Systems and Materials Center (CogniGron). They discuss how this unusual interdisciplinary research center works, why nanoscale ferroelectrics may be useful in brain-like systems, and a little about how they are designed and fabricated.

In this episode of the Brains and Machines podcast, Dr. Giulia D’Angelo from the Italian Institute of Technology interviews her IIT colleague, Dr. Simeon Bamford, who is currently working on tactile neuromorphic sensors. They talk about creating circuits to perform functions lost to brain damage, Bamford’s involvement with the commercialization of dynamic vision sensors, and his latest research on...

In the latest episode of  Brains and Machines , EE Times regular  Dr. Sunny Bains  talks to  Professor Melika Payvand , who designs neural systems from the circuit-level up at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich. You’ll find out the role that memristors are playing in the systems she designs, why neural circuits need to operate at different timescales, and why copying some features of biol...

In this latest episode of  Brains and Machines , Dr. Sunny Bains  interviews now-Emeritus  Professor Steve Furber  as he prepares to leave the University of Manchester. They talk about associative memories, the original SpiNNaker neural simulator designed using densely-interconnected ARM cores, and the new generation of the technology currently being assembled. Discussion follows with  Dr. Giulia...

In this episode of the  Brains and Machines  podcast, Dr.  Giulia D’Angelo , from the Czech Technical University in Prague,  talks to Professor  Guillermo Gallego , from the Technical University of Berlin. They discuss the application of the new generation of bio-inspired, event-driven cameras and their algorithms to extract cues of motion, depth and optical flow estimation. After that, Giulia dis...

In this episode of the  Brains and Machines  podcast, Sunny Bains  talks to  Dr Yulia Sandamirskaya , who has just created the Neuromorphic Computing Group at Zurich University of Applied Sciences. We discuss the role that dynamical systems theory plays in robotics, her work with Intel’s Loihi platform, and what she plans to do in her new position at ZHAW, particularly related to vision. After tha...

In this episode of the  Brains and Machines  podcast, EE Times regular  Sunny Bains  talks to  Professor Giacomo Indiveri , from the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich. They talk about building biologically-plausible neural circuits in silicon, the trade-offs involved in using analog and digital circuits, and how the technology has been translated into startups. After that, Sunny discusses th...

In this episode of the  Brains and Machines  podcast, Sunny Bains  talks to  Dr Mitra Hartmann , Professor of both Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University, and head of their sensory and neural engineering group. They discuss the ways in which modelling animal perceptual systems—in her case, the rat—can make us better at both understanding the brain and building technology....

In this episode of  Brains and Machines , Sunny Bains  interviews  Elisabetta Chicca , head of the bio-inspired Circuits and Systems research group at the University of Groningen, about building neural chips with memristors, adding electronic brains to neural robots, some of the current difficulties with learning algorithms for spiking systems and more. Discussion follows with  Giulia D’Angelo  fr...

In this first episode of the Brains and Machines  podcast, Sunny Bains  interviews  André van Schaik  from the Western Sydney University about how neuromorphic engineering has changed since the early 90s, a new project to help simulate neural and neuromorphic models, and more. Discussion follows with  Giulia D’Angelo  from the Czech Technical University in Prague and  Ralph Etienne-Cummings  from...