Those of you who have taken a closer look at the global neuromorphic research community will likely have come across the annual Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop, a three week project-based meeting in eponymous Telluride, a charming former Victorian mining town in the Rocky Mountain high country of southwestern Colorado. Nestled in a deep glacial valley, Telluride sits at an elevation of 8750 ft (2667 m) and is surrounded by majestic rugged peaks. Truly a scenic location for a workshop.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), which has continuously supported the Telluride Workshop since its beginnings in the 1990s, described it in a 2023 announcement as follows: It “will bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers from academia and industry, including engineers, computer scientists, neuroscientists, behavioral and cognitive scientists (…) The annual three-week hands-on, project-based meeting is organized around specific topic areas to explore organizing principles of neural cognition that can inspire implementation in artificial systems. Each topic area is guided by a group of experts who will provide tutorials, lectures and hands-on project guidance.”
https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportu...ng-augmented-intelligence/announcements/95341
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The workshop took place over 3-weeks as a project-based meeting organized around specific topic areas to bring the organizing principles of neural cognition into artificial intelligence, and to use AI to understand how brains work.
sites.google.com
The topic areas for the 2024 Telluride Neuromorphic Workshop are now online. As every year, the list of topic leaders and invited speakers includes the crème de la crème of neuromorphic researchers from all over the world. While no one from Brainchip has made the invited speakers’ list (at least not to date), I was extremely pleased to notice that Akida will be featured nevertheless! It has taken the academic neuromorphic community ages to take Brainchip seriously (cf my previous post on Open Neuromorphic:
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-404235), but here we are, finally getting acknowledged alongside the usual suspects:
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Some readers will now presumably shrug their shoulders and consider this mention of Brainchip in a workshop programme as being insignificant as opposed to those coveted commercial announcements. To me, however, the inclusion of Brainchip at Telluride marks a milestone.
Also keep in mind what NSF Program Director Soo-Siang Lim said about Telluride (see link above): “This workshop has a long and successful track-record of advancing and integrating our understanding of biological and artificial systems of learning. Many collaborations catalyzed by the workshop have led to significant technology innovations, and the training of future industry and academic leaders.”
I’d just love to know who of the four topic leaders and/or co-organisers had suggested to include Brainchip for their hands-on project “Processing space-based data using neuromorphic computing hardware” (and whether this was readily agreed on or not):
Was it one of the two colleagues from Western Sydney University’s International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems (ICNS)? Gregory Cohen (who is responsible for Astrosite, WSU’s containerised neuromorphic inspired mobile telescope observatory as well as for the modification of the two neuromorphic cameras on the ISS as part of the USAFA Falcon Neuro project) or Alexandre Marcireau?
Or was it Gregor Lenz, who left Synsense in mid-2023 to co-found Neurobus (“At Neurobus we’re harnessing the power of neuromorphic computing to transform space technology”) and is also one of the co-founders of the Open Neuromorphic community? He was one of the few live viewers of Cristian Axenie’s January 15 online presentation on the TinyML Vision Zero San Jose Competition (where his TH Nürnberg team, utilising Akida for their event-based visual motion detection and tracking of pedestrians, had come runner-up), and asked a number of intriguing questions about Akida during the live broadcast.
Or was it possibly Jens Egholm Pedersen, the Danish doctoral student at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden’s largest technical university, who hosted said presentation by Cristian Axenie on the Open Neuromorphic YouTube channel and appeared to be genuinely impressed about Akida (and the Edge Impulse platform), too?
Oh, and last, but not least:
Our CTO Anthony M Lewis aka Tony Lewis has been to Telluride numerous times: the workshop website lists him as one of the early participants back in 1996 (when he was with UCLA’s Computer Science Department) - no info is given on those attending the workshop in the first three years of its existence 1993-1995. Tony Lewis is subsequently listed as a guest speaker for the 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004 workshops (in his then capacity as the founder of Iguana Robotics) - information on the participants between 2006 - 2009 as well as for the year 2011 is marked as “lost”. In 2019, Tony Lewis had once again been invited as either topic leader or guest speaker, but according to the website could not come.
So I guess there is a good chance we will see him return to Telluride one day, this time as CTO of Brainchip, catching up with a lot old friends and acquaintances, many of whom he also keeps in touch with via his extensive LinkedIn network, so they’d definitely know what he’s been up to.
As I said in another post six weeks ago:
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