Annual Telluride Workshop on Neuromorphic Engineering

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

The Telluride Workshops arose from a strategic decision by the NSF to encourage the interface between Neuroscience and Engineering. The recommendation was for NSF to organize and fund a hands-on workshop to draw together an international group of scientists interested in exploring neuromorphic engineering. This new field seeks to design and fabricate artificial neural systems, such as vision systems, head-eye systems, auditory systems and autonomous robots, whose architecture and design principles are based on those of biological nervous systems. The three-week long Telluride Workshops, have been held annually since then (cf. the Telluride homepage at http://www.ini.unizh.ch/telluride2000/). The workshop includes background lectures, practical tutorials on analog VLSI design, hands-on projects, and special interest groups. There are two daily tutorials covering general material. Participants are free to explore topics of their own choosing in the afternoon; while projects and interest groups meet in the late afternoons, and after dinner. About 60 people are invited to the workshop. Participants are from academia, government laboratories, and industry. Backgrounds span physics, robotics, computer science, neurophysiology, electrical engineering, and computational neuroscience. The workshop provides background material in cellular and systems neuroscience, all aspects of analog VLSI design, simulation, layout, and testing as well as sensorimotor integration and active vision systems. Working groups are established in a variety of areas such as robotics and Central Pattern Generators, sensorimotor interactions, inter-chip communications, active vision, audition, and spatial localization using vision and audition together, attention and selection, locomotion and industrial applications.