Educational

Giacomo Indiveri received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in computer science and electrical engineering from the University of Genova, Genova, Italy, in 1992 and 2004, respectively.

Currently, he is a dual Professor at the Faculty of Science of the University of Zurich and at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering of ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He is the director of the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI) of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. He was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Division of Biology at Caltech and at the Institute of Neuroinformatics of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant on "Neuromorphic processors" in 2011 and an ERC Consolidator Grant on neuromorphic cognitive agents in 2016.

His research interests lie in the study of real and electronic neural processing systems, with a particular focus on spike-based learning and spike-based recurrent neural network dynamics. His research and development activities focus on the full custom hardware implementation of real-time sensory-motor systems using analog/digital neuromorphic circuits and emerging memory technologies.

Steve Furber received a B.A. in mathematics in 1974 and a Ph.D. in aerodynamics in 1980, both from the University of Cambridge. He is ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. From 1980 to 1990, he worked in the hardware development group at Acorn Computers Ltd and was a principal designer of the BBC Microcomputer (1982) and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor.

Designed with colleague Sophie Wilson as part of a national TV program on personal computing, well over a million BBC Micros were sold and used in more than 80 percent of all U.K. schools. Furber and Wilson then co-designed the 32-bit Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) processor (1985) to address a need at Acorn for a new microprocessor that outperformed any then commercially available. The ARM processor core is now used in thousands of different products, from mobile phones and tablets to digital televisions and video games. It has enabled the mobile revolution in computing with its efficient power-sipping microprocessors. The number of ARM processor cores now shipped exceeds 180 billion, or more than four ARM microprocessors for every person on earth.

Furber's current research interests include the SpiNNaker project, which seeks to emulate a small portion of the human brain using one million ARM processor cores.

Kwabena Boahen received his B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering in 1989 from Johns Hopkins University and his PhD in computation and neural systems in 1997 from the California Institute of Technology, where he was advised by Carver Mead. For his PhD thesis, Boahen designed and fabricated a silicon chip emulating the functioning of the retina. After completing his PhD, Boahen joined the faculty of University of Pennsylvania where he held the Skirkanich Term Junior Chair.

In 2005 he moved to Stanford University and is currently the director of the Brains in Silicon Lab. He is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of neuromorphic engineering. He was named an IEEE fellow in 2016.

Specific contributions throughout his career include the development of the current-mode subthreshold CMOS circuit design paradigm, the address-event approach to communicating spikes between neuromorphic chips, and the scalable design of multi-chip systems. Boahen’s chips are mixed-mode: they employ analog circuits for computation and digital circuits for communication. Boahen's work has demonstrated that neuromorphic computer chips are capable of reproducing many types of brain phenomena across a large range of scales (e.g ion-channel dynamics, excitable membrane behavior,, the orientation tuning of neurons in Visual Cortex,, and neural synchrony). Utilizing these breakthroughs, Boahen's Stanford lab built the first neurmorphic system with one million spiking neurons (and billions of synapses), Neurogrid.