Monday, June 30, 2008

Day 2: First day of the workshop

Today was the first day of the workshop. It ran for most part of the day from morning 8:30 am until 9:00 pm in the night. Of course we had more than 3 hours break for lunch and dinner break.


Entrance to the Telluride Elementary School

Today I listened to some excellent line of speakers. Most of the speakers were very good in covering many interesting topics in the Neuromorphic Engineering area. Today, I enjoyed most of the talk (and surprisingly I was awake during most of the talks).

The topics that were covered today included the following ( I am also giving a grade for each of the speakers and its just my individual evaluation):

(1) Towards Neurally Integrated High Degrees of Freedom Prosthetic Limbs by Ralph Cummings from John Hopkins Univ: The talk focussed on developing Prosthetic and the principles of locomotion different animals and human beings. It was an interesting approach to develop tools/machines for disabled people. I would give him 3/5 for his talk (because I did not enjoy the second half of his talk where he rushed through the slides.

(2) Neuro-robotic Locomotion: This talk by Tony Lewis of University of Arizona gave a good perspective of robotics and various means to build robots using traditional robotic principles. Later on he shifted his focus to neurorobotic and application of neural principles for robotic construction. He was little bit vague in the second part but overall the lecture gave many good perspective on different principles of connecting robotics and neuroscience. I would give 4/5 for his talk.

(3) Locomotion by Cohen: I should have skipped this particular talk but made the mistake of sitting in this talk. I did not understand many things (nor found it interesting).

(4) Survey of Neuromorphics Engineering: Nice overview and brief survey of the development of this area. The talk was given by Shih-Chii Liu from INI, Zurich. It was interesting for its historical treatment and helped us to get a good perspective of the overall progression of this area. I would give her talk 4/5.

Overall I had a good day with many interesting insights and possibilities for many interesting works that can be carried out in this area.

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