Building Brains – How to build physical models of brain circuits in silicon
Event Description: The brain is a universe of 100 billion cells interacting through a constantly changing network of 1000 trillion synapses. It runs on a power budget of 20 Watts and holds an internal model of the world. Understanding our brain is among the key challenges for science, on equal footing with understanding genesis and the fate of our universe. The lecture will describe how to build physical, neuromorphic models of brain circuits in silicon. Neuromorphic systems can be used to gain understanding of learning and development in biological brains and as artificial neural systems for cognitive computing.
Event Page Here | Meetup Event Page Here
Date: Wednesday 5 April 2017 6-7pm
Venue: Monash Biomedical Imaging 770 Blackburn Road Clayton
Karlheinz Meier
Karlheinz Meier (* 1955) received his PhD in physics in 1984 from Hamburg University in Germany. He has more than 25 years of experience in experimental particle physics with contributions to 4 major experiments at particle colliders at DESY in Hamburg and CERN in Geneva. After fellowships and scientific staff positions at CERN and DESY he was appointed full professor of physics at Heidelberg University in 1992. In Heidelberg he co-founded the Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics and a laboratory for the development of microelectronic circuits for science experiments. For the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) he led a 10-year effort to design and build a large-scale electronic data processing system providing on-the-fly data reduction by 3 orders of magnitude enabling among other achievements the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012. In particle physics he took a leading international role in shaping the future of the field as president of the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA).
Around 2005 he gradually shifted his scientific interests towards large-scale electronic implementations of brain-inspired computer architectures. His group pioneered several innovations in the field like the conception of a platform-independent description language for neural circuits (PyNN), time-compressed mixed-signal neuromorphic computing systems and wafer-scale integration for their implementation. He led 2 major European initiatives, FACETS and BrainScaleS, that both demonstrated the rewarding Interdisciplinary collaboration of neuroscience and information science. In 2009 he was one of the initiators of the European Human Brain Project (HBP) that was approved in 2013. In the HBP he leads the subproject on neuromorphic computing with the goal of establishing brain-inspired computing paradigms as research tools for neuroscience and generic hardware systems for cognitive computing, a new way of processing and interpreting the spatio-temporal structure of large data volumes. In the HBP he is a member of the project directorate and vice-chair of the science and infrastructure board.
Karlheinz Meier engages in public dissemination of science. His YouTube channel with physics movies has received more than a Million hits and he delivers regular lectures to the public about his research and general science topics.
