Karlheinz Meier

From biology to your coffee machine? - How neuromorphic computing may affect our future life

The amazing computational capabilities of biological brains have long spurred the thinking of futurists. Energy efficient and softwareless computing like the brain does would basically stop all the trouble computers brought into our daily life. Neuromorphic computing certainly has the potential to make a move in that direction, but there is still work to be done. In the talk I will argue that the solution is to bring more biology into our neuromorphic systems. I will describe state-of-the-art in the field and ongoing work on next generation systems.  I will also argue that a project like the HBP is an ideal breeding ground for the fielSrd.

Short CV

Karlheinz Meier is a professor of experimental physics at Heidelberg University in Germany. He received his PhD in 1984 from Hamburg University. For more than 30 years he worked in experimental particle physics, contributing to several experiments at the CERN and DESY laboratories. He designed and implemented a large-scale data selection system for an LHC experiment at CERN: Since 2005 he has shifted his interest towards custom hardware implementations of neural circuits. He has initiated and led 2 major European initiatives in the field (FACETS and BrainScaleS) and is currently co-director of the Human Brain Project.