10 November, 2021, by Michael Schmuker
In normal times, the Capocaccia workshop towards Neuromorphic Intelligence would be held each year around April/May. For reasons we are all aware of this workshop hasn’t happened for the last two years. Finally now it looks as if we will be gathering again in Sardinia next spring! Check the workshop site for details.
Every year, workshop participants engage in two weeks of deep collaborative work towards producing a viable prototype that demonstrates a project idea. These prototypes are demoed on the last day of the workshop.
NEUROTECH is proud to again offer a prize for the best demo at the upcoming workshop! Details of the prize and the conditions to participate will be announced nearer the time.
The last team to win the award before the COVID-enforced hiatus presented “An Event-based Electronic Nose Sensor with an Application in Gas-Based Navigation”. The team was led by Damien Drix (U Hertfordshire) and was composed of Sam Sutton and Rebecca Miko (both also UH), Marcus Schüffny (TU Dresden) and Torben Schoepe (U Bielefeld, now Groningen). Congrats to winning 500 EUR cash prize!
Their demo was the result of an impressive collaborative effort that combined electronic gas sensing with event-based sampling and a bio-inspired functional spiking network that was implemented on the SpiNNaker Neuromorphic hardware system. Signals from two gas spaced a couple centimeters apart were converted into spike trains, which were then fed into a model of a spiking Elementary Motion Detector (sEMD, from [Milde 2018]). The resulting system was able to reliably discriminate the source direction of odor puffs delivered to the system, relative to the axis of the two gas sensors. This work has led to several follow-up studies, most notably on signal processing for event-based olfaction [Drix 2021] and event-driven, gas-based robot navigation; the latter being still pursued by the team.
Congratulations to the winning team 2019 and best of luck to all participants in the upcoming workshop!
Milde M, Bertrand O, Ramachandran H, Egelhaaf M, Chicca E. Spiking Elementary Motion Detector in Neuromorphic Systems. Neural Computation 30:1-34 (2018).
Drix D, Schmuker M. Resolving fast gas transients with Metal-Oxide sensors. ACS Sensors 6:688-692 (2021).
17 March, 2020
Moore's law about the exponential growth of transistor count in conventional chips is nothings against how fast things are moving with CoViD-19. Conference and workshop organisers are facing tough decisions these days due to the rapid spread of the virus, and the mounting uncertainty regarding the ability to travel among many scientists across the world.
10 February, 2020
by Sam Sutton
One of the many things that makes the Capocaccia Workshop so unique is the concept that participants form groups to work on neuromorphic demos, to be presented on the last day of the workshop.
Each year, NEUROTECH awards a prize, worth 500 €, for the best neuromorphic demo at the CapoCaccia workshop. In 2019, a cross-institutional team of five young researchers convinced the jury with their project on an event-based electronic nose.
11 November, 2019
It's that time of the year again: Days are getting short, it's getting colder, and everyone in the NEUROTECH community is eagerly awaiting a special event... the call for Capocaccia Fellowship applications!
Wait no longer!
10 September, 2019
From Apr 23 - May 04, 2019 the 13th CapoCaccia Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop took place at the Hotel dei Pini located close to Alghero, in the beautiful island of Sardinia, Italy.
This conference has been running every year since 2007, and this is the 6th time I have personally been able to attend. The first time I was in CapoCaccia everything was new and imposing. Now, some years after and 6 CapoCaccias later, I, together with others, had the opportunity to be part of the organizing committee of this meeting.
26 August, 2019
The Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop was again a success this year, it brought together experts of the field, curious newcomers and lots of enthusiastic participants! For the first time ever, European participants could apply for the NEUROTHECH fellowship. Fours applicants were selected for participation by the Workshop Organizing Team and received the fellowship.
17 June, 2019
The International Conference on Memristive Materials, Devices & Systems (MEMRISYS2019) will take place in Dresden, Germany from 8 to 11 July 2019.
NEUROTECH is happy to a prize of 500 € for the best demonstration of memristor-based hardware and applications in the field of neuromorphic computing technology.
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