Prof. Elisabetta Chicca, University of Groningen
Title: Stochastic Spiking Wireless Multimodal Sensory Systems (SWIMS)
Abstract: The sustainable operation of billions of future Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensor nodes requires a massive reduction in their energy-consumption enabling operation on only tens of micro Watt power harvested from the environment. With present designs having large overheads at the interfaces between the sensors, the digital signal processing, and the wireless transmission due to signal conversion from analog to digital and back such low energy consumption is unachievable. To address this issue we propose a novel energy-efficient architecture for smart multimodal sensory systems based on an end-to-end analog stochastic spiking signaling chain. This architecture proposal ranges from sensors exhausting the spiking signal encoding of vanadium dioxide oscillators, over an analog spiking neural network-based signal processing, up to spike-based wireless communications. Besides removing any signal conversion overheads, this approach enables an event-based processing perfectly fitted to sensor applications aiming to detect rare events with minimal energy consumption. This represents a radical paradigm shift for the realization of highly energy-efficient information processing systems, away from today's ubiquitous digital signal processing towards analog spike processing based on a unique combination of bio-inspired neuromorphic concepts and novel materials and devices.
Bio: Elisabetta Chicca obtained a "Laurea" degree (M.Sc.) in Physics from the University of Rome 1 "La Sapienza", Italy in 1999 with a thesis on CMOS spike-based learning. In 2006 she received a Ph.D. in Natural Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ, Physics department) and in Neuroscience from the Neuroscience Center Zurich. E. Chicca has carried out her research as a Postdoctoral fellow (2006-2010) and as a Group Leader (2010-2011) at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (University of Zurich and ETH Zurich) working on development of neuromorphic signal processing and sensory systems. Between 2011 and 2020 she led the Neuromorphic Behaving Systems research group at Bielefeld University (Faculty of Technology and Cognitive Interaction Technology Center of Excellence, CITEC). In 2020 she established the Bio-Inspired Circuits and Systems group at the University of Groningen. Her current interests are in the development of CMOS models of cortical circuits for brain-inspired computation, learning in spiking CMOS neural networks and memristive systems, bio-inspired sensing (vision, touch, olfaction, audition, active electrolocation) and motor control. She combines these research approaches with the aim of understanding neural computation by constructing behaving agents which can robustly operate in real-world environments.
