Neuromorphics: Brains in Silicon

While traversing through the natural world, you effortlessly perceive and react to a rich stream of stimuli. This constantly changing stream evokes spatiotemporal patterns of spikes that propagate through your brain from one ensemble of neurons to another. An ensemble may memorize a spatiotemporal pattern at the speed of life and recall it at the speed of thought. In the first half of this course, we will discuss and model how a neural ensemble memorizes and recalls such a spatiotemporal pattern. In the second half, we will explore how neuromorphic hardware could exploit these neurobiological mechanisms to run AI not with megawatts in the cloud but rather with watts on a smartphone.