Kiara Warren, Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop, Week 3

Hello everyone! This was my last week with the Neuromorphs and we left it on a great note. I once again spent my mornings at their in-depth lectures and in the afternoons I got more involved with a project in the Auditory-Motor Coupling group. Since this was also the last week of the workshop, I attended the presentations on everyone’s projects from the last three weeks.

Some of my favorite talks this week were about training algorithms to track odor plumes like insects, understanding how the brain processes auditory language input, a discussion on AI’s origins, current state, and future, and the use of organoids in research. I enjoyed the talk on odor plumes because it showed a way that the natural world can inspire learning techniques in software. The auditory processing talk helped me realize the work our brains do to take distinct sounds in quick succession and assign them to words and their meanings without taking forever to do so. The AI talk gave me a solid foundation in the subject alongside opinions from people knowledgeable in the field. Since organoids (this talk was geared towards brain organoids) were involved in the Open-Source Neuromorphic Hardware group’s projects, the talk on them gave me insight into what that group was working on and how else they could be used.

The project I got involved with was based around a game that tracks your errors while the EEG records electrical activity from your brain to see what effect failure has on brain activity. The game had simple graphics and a zig-zagging path that you needed to keep your icon on top of. When the icon leaves the track, the game draws a red line between the path and icon, then measures how far off you get. I watched the people working on it analyze data and they gave me the necessary links to try and run the program on my computer. When I wasn’t observing, most of my time was spent downloading programs to run the code and finding out how to get from github to seeing the program run. I never got the code to run on my computer, but the process taught me a lot about how people collaborate when they code and the programs I would need to know and use if I were coding with them. After all that downloading, next time I try to run code outside of my browser, it probably won’t take as long!

The culmination of the workshop was the group’s demos for the public and presentations for each other. Some of the projects that stood out to me were the hijacked piano, a game that reads your brain, robot cars with event based cameras, and simulations based on organoids playing pong. The hijacked piano would play the wrong notes every now and then in order to analyze a player’s expectations based on their skill level. The game that reads your brain used an EEG and selective attention to see which set of sounds in their soundtrack you were paying attention to and moved a car left or right accordingly. Event based cameras only record when something in the frame changes and cars that use this technology were able to effectively avoid obstacles in front of them. By using data from organoids that were trained to play pong, this group was able to create simulations that you could play pong against. There were so many more interesting presentations and demos, I definitely recommend attending the ones that are open to public if you can in the future!

I am so grateful to have been able to intern with the Neuromorphs for these past three weeks. They taught me so much about the importance of expectations in our brains, spiking neural networks, and learning about our brains from algorithms and technology, then getting inspiration for efficient algorithms and technology from the brain. I got to observe their incredible collaboration and get a peak into techniques I can use in the future. When I was first told about the Neuromorphs, the first thing I learned about them (aside from what Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering was) was that they laugh a lot, and that held true. I’d like to thank all the Neuromorphs, my mentor Andreas Andreou, Nana Naisbitt, Pinhead, and Sarah Holbrooke for supporting me in setting up and attending this internship. I’m so glad to have learned from such a friendly, welcoming group of people about the vastly interesting field they work in and I hope to keep on learning more in the future.