Research topic: Neuromorphic engineering systems and applications. A snapshot of neuromorphic systems engineering

Abstract

The 14 papers in this research topic were solicited primarily from attendees to the two most important hands-on workshops in neuromorphic engineering: the Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop (www.ine-web.org) and the Capo Caccia Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop (capocaccia.ethz.ch). The papers show the results of feasibility studies of new concepts, as well as neuromorphic systems that have been constructed from more established neuromorphic technologies. Five papers exploit neuromorphic dynamic vision sensor (DVS) events that mimic the asynchronous and sparse spikes on biology's optic nerve fiber (Delbruck and Lang, 2013; O'Connor et al., 2013; Rea et al., 2013; Brandli et al., 2014; Camunas-Mesa et al., 2014; Clady et al., 2014). Two papers are on the hot topic (based on largest number of views) of event-driven computation in deep belief networks (DBNs) (O'Connor et al., 2013; Neftci et al., 2014). Two papers use floating gate technology for neuromorphic analog circuits (Gupta and Markan, 2014; Marr and Hasler, 2014). The collection is rounded out by papers on central pattern generators (Ambroise et al., 2013), neural fields for cognitive architectures (Sandamirskaya, 2014), sound perception (Coath et al., 2014), polychronous spiking networks (Wang et al., 2014), and automatic parameter tuning for large network simulations (Carlson et al., 2014).