Professor André van Schaik presents lecture at Indian Institute of Science

Professor André van Schaik (pictured right) recently presented a lecture on neuromorphic engineering at the Indian Institute of Science(opens in a new window) in Bangalore, India.

André's talk was part of the Centre for Brain Research (CBR) Lecture Series and took place on Wednesday 23 September 2015.

In the talk, André gave an introduction to neuromorphic engineering, what it is, where it came from, and why it is currently a hot topic.

He discussed several of the reasons that have caused an explosion of interest in this area and illustrated this with some examples from the work in our Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience group.

He showed how modelling fly vision has led to smart sensors for optical trackballs and mice, and how modelling the auditory pathway has enabled the development of smart audio processors for mobile phones.

Nowadays, there is significant effort in the field to create hardware to implement neural networks with millions or billions of neurons. André presented the largest such network developed to date with 10 billion neurons running in real time.

Finally, he presented a brief history of the development of neural networks, and discussed why this is driving the need for implementations of large scale neural networks.

Professor van Schaik is recognised as one of the world leaders in neuromorphic engineering and in 2014 was elected as a Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to Neuromorphic Circuits and Systems.

He has published more than 150 papers and is an inventor on 35 patents. His research interests are Neuromorphic Engineering, Computational Neuroscience, and Biomedical Electronics.