Day5: Beginning of the mission

I am not updating the blog everyday. I did not do the update for more than 3 days and today I am going to add all materials related to talks and happening on July 3rd 2008.

I have noticed that I am sometimes getting easily tired these days. It is mainly because I am not sleeping at the appropriate time. I need to correct on this issue.

Coming back to today. It was a day filled with talks and work-group meetings. I tried to attend as many workgroup to get a glimpses of various possible projects and collaborative work. But overall it was a fruitful day with many interesting talks and ideas.

First person to open the day was Lloyd Watts, CTO of Audience. It is interesting to note that he was also somehow associated with Carver Mead from Caltech. Another interesting thing is that he is also one of the few person working hard to commercialize Neuromorphic Engineering Technology. Its been a long complaint from my heart that this area did not have any company that demonstrates the practicality of neuromorphic engineering technology. Without this authenticity is lost and the effort becomes more scientific rather than engineering exercise. He gave a good talk and demonstration about how his idea about Cochlea model evolve into a product. I was really impressed by his talk. One intereseting point that he raised later was that if a startup need to succeed than its mainly because of the good rapport and relation that the startup makes with the big company which will ultimately sell the product. This rapport is important and efforts need to be taken by means of sincerity, commitment, helping the customer companies realize the goal. Along with excellent technology all these things are need for success of a startup firm.


The next talk was given by Paul Hasler from GA Tech. It was an interesting talk about the applicability and validity of using Analog Arrays called FPAA for simulating large circuits. He was quite good in explaining the principles of FPAA and its evolution. As such many of the ideas presented in the work is useful even if we go for an application specific architecture for neuromorphic systems.

The third talk of the day was given by Chuck Higgins from Univ. of Arizona. It was mainly about his research on understanding the brain of various insects and modeling them. It was interesting to know the kind of effort that he took to design system for easily tracking and managing behaviour of insects. I dont remember much of the talk and would recommend you to look at the slides ( i will post all the presentation materials soon)



The remaining part of the day focussed on various issues and technology.
First a small demonstration about using Subversion System called Tortuise SVN.
Next a brief introduction about USB and associated tools for USB drivers/firmware.
Then we had a brief chat about spike based processing and computation challenges.
Following that we had the first session on GP-GPU.

It was day filled with excitement and ideas and inspiration.

Hope in the remaining days we accomplish something worthwhile.