NEUROTECH FORUM II

Neuromorphic Computing Technologies: Opportunities, challenges and Applications Roadmap

Date: March 15, 2021 9:00 -17:00 CET Time

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already enabling accelerated classification and discovery in a broad range of applications. However, challenges remain in the trust in and explainability of the outputs results. Furthermore, the implementation of AI on legacy computing systems suffers from performance and power efficiency challenges, limiting the application scope. Hence, the success of AI created an urgent need for dedicated neuromorphic computing hardware as well as more advanced architectures and algorithms. Establishing the neuromorphic computing technology of tomorrow, wide research efforts are deployed in materials science, circuit design, fabrication and algorithms.

This forum of the European Union funded project NEUROTECH will bring together experts from academia, industry, SME’s and start-ups to address some of the most urgent questions in AI:

what are the challenges – performance, reliability, ethics – in applying AI and neuromorphic computing technologies?
which neuromorphic computing technologies are already available, how to build functional systems and applications?
how can enterprises adopt AI and neuromorphic computing technology – What support would accelerate the success?
how to improve and strengthen interactions and collaboration between academia and industry in Europe and globally.

The forum will also depict the landscape of neuromorphic computing technology users, with a special focus on the use of AI in edge-computing.

To be held virtually in conjunction with the 2021 NICE workshop:

https://niceworkshop.org/nice-2021/

Topical Agenda

Time	Topic	Speaker
Morning
9:00	Challenges in NCT	Chair: Dr. Bert Offrein, IBM
	Welcome to the Forum	Dr. Bert Offrein, IBM
	Optimizing memory device technology for energy efficient AI hardware	Dr. Peter Debacker, IMEC
9:30	Neuromorphic Computing platforms	Chair: Dr. Elisa Donati, UZH/ETHZ and Antonio La Porta, IBM Zurich
	Accelerating AI with Machine Intelligence Compute Systems	Dr. Victoria Rege, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Graphcore
	Mixed-signal neuromorphic circuits and systems for building autonomous cognitive agents	Prof. Giacomo Indiveri, Institute of Neuroinformatics UZH/ETHZ
	NeuroChiplets: Modular Design of 2.5D and 3D Silicon Brains for Machine Intelligence (Perception and Cognition)	Prof. Andreas G. Andreou, Johns Hopkins University and University of Cyprus
	Deep learning acceleration using electronic and photonic in-memory computing	Dr. Abu Sebastian, IBM Zurich
10:45	Coffee Break
11:00	The precision dilemma	Chair: Dr. Melika Payvand, UZH/ETHZ
	From noisy devices to stable solutions	Dr. Damien Querlioz, CNRS Researcher at Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies
11:30	Towards AI at the edge	Chair: Dr. Peter Debacker, IMEC
	Edge AI @Withings	Nicolas Genain, Digital Biomarkers, Machine Learning and Analytics Director at Withings
	Robotics: Neuromorphic perception for robots	Dr. Chiara Bartolozzi, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT)
Lunch Break
Afternoon
13:30	The startup landscape in neuromorphic computing	Chair: Dr. Laura Begon-Lours, IBM Zurich
	SynSense	Dr. Dylan Muir
	IniVation - Removing barriers to adoption of neuromorphic technology	Dr. Kynan Eng
	LightON - Photonic computing for massively parallel AI	Dr. Laurent Daudet
14:00	Adopting AI in manufacturing. A perspective from II-VI Inc.	Marc Seifried, II-VI Laser Enterprise Zürich
14:30	Panel: Promote bridges between industry and academia	Dr. Dylan Muir (SynSense), Dr. Manu Nair (Synthara), Dr. Kynan Eng (IniVation), Dr. Laurent Daudet (LightON)
15:30	Coffee break
15:45	Neuromorphic computing and ethics	Chair: Steve Furber, University of Manchester
	Presentation: Neuromorphic Computing for Social Good	Dr. Marcello Ienca, ETH Zurich, Dep. of Health Sciences and Technology
	Panel	Dr. Marcello Ienca (ETH Zurich), Steve Furber (University of Manchester), Prof. Vincent Müller (VC; TU Eindhoven & University of Leeds), Dr. Ron Chrisley (RC; University of Sussex), Dr. Dylan Muir (SynSense)
16:45	Summary and conclusions
17:00	Close