Free Open-to-all Workshop “Application roadmap for neuromorphic technology”
Online and Onsite at ULB, Brussels
Organised by Professor Bert Offrein from IBM Research, Zurich and Professor Serge Massar from Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Please register under https://forms.gle/C1NnuDBPMiDoRYFN8
For participation in person please register before 8 March 2023!
Date: 15 March 2023; 9-17:30 CET
Venue: Université Libre de Bruxelles
Campus PLAINE, Boulevard du Triomphe, B-1050 Bruxelles
The meeting will be held in the “Salle Solvay”, building NO, 5th floor (see the map of the campus below).
Reaching the campus:
The campus is on Metro line 5 (Stop DELTA) and on bus line 71.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become part of our society. The recent announcement of ChatGPT is the latest example of a new AI application, creating a lot of expectations going well-beyond what we have known so far. The neural networks behind most AI applications are very large. In the specific example of ChatGPT, the underlying neural network architecture is based on GPT-3 with more than 100 billion parameters. Accordingly, the energy associated to training and inferring such systems is a challenge. Moreover, the trend to ever larger neural networks makes energy consumption an increasingly pressing aspect of attention. Fortunately, new technological concepts are being established to improve performance and power-efficiency.
In the workshop “Application roadmap for neuromorphic technology” some of these new platforms will be presented, as well as the way how they can mitigate the energy challenge. In discussions at the workshop, we will go a decisive step further and analyze the requirements to make these platforms successful. This will not only address technological, scaling and cost aspects, but also the roadmap from a research project to a commercial product. We will explore conditions required to make a new idea successful. It is not the goal to select the ‘best’ technology or concept currently being investigated but position them on a timeline, starting from new circuits in today’s silicon technology to nanodevices and photonic architectures further out in the future.
The goal of this exciting exercise is to obtain understanding for the path beyond research, to be commercially successful and make the associated positive impact on society.
Speakers
Liane Bernstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Liane Bernstein received her Bachelor of Engineering from Polytechnique Montreal in 2016, specializing in Photonics. There, in the groups of Profs. Frédéric Leblond and Caroline Boudoux, she worked extensively on advancing biomedical imaging techniques such as Raman spectroscopy and optical coherence tomography. Subsequently, Liane took up a summer internship at Photon Etc, where she worked on improving the signal-to-noise ratio of hyperspectral imagers. In fall 2016, Liane started her graduate work in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where in 2018, she earned her Master of Science for “Ultrahigh-Resolution, Deep-Penetration Spectral-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography” in Prof. Andy Yun’s group. As PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Liane is currently developing both theoretical descriptions as well as experimental demonstrations of optical deep neural networks in the Quantum Photonics Laboratory.
Dr Thomas Van Vaerenbergh, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, HPE
Dr Thomas Van Vaerenbergh received the master’s degree in Applied Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Photonics from Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, in 2010 and 2014, respectively. Since 2014, he has been with Hewlett Packard Labs, part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. His main research interests include optical computing, accelerators for combinatorial optimization, and the modeling and design of passive silicon photonic devices, such as microring resonators and grating couplers.
Prof Nikos Pleros, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Dr Nikos Pleros is Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics (CSD), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Greece, since September 2007 and a collaborative faculty member at the Information Technologies Institute, Center for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH). He obtained the Diploma and the PhD Degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2000 and 2004, respectively. From 2005 until September 2007 he was a Teaching and Research Associate at the Photonics Communications Research Laboratory (PCRL) at NTUA. In 2008, he co-founded the Photonics Systems and Networks (Phos-NET) research group.
Prof S. J. 
Ben Yoo, University of California
Dr S. J. Ben Yoo is Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of California at Davis (UC Davis). His research at UC Davis includes high-performance optical switching systems, elastic optical networking, and software defined heterogeneous networks. Prior to joining UC Davis in 1999, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Bellcore, leading technical efforts in optical networking research and systems integration. His research activities at Bellcore included optical-label switching for the next-generation Internet, reconfigurable optical networks, and standardization of OC-192 and DWDM metro networks. He also participated in the advanced technology demonstration network/multiwavelength optical networking (ATD/MONET) systems integration, and a number of standardization activities. Prior to joining Bellcore in 1991, he conducted research on nonlinear optical processes at Stanford University (BS’84, MS’86, PhD’91, Stanford University). Prof. Yoo is Fellow of IEEE and OSA, and a recipient of the DARPA Award for Sustained Excellence in 1997, the Bellcore CEO Award in 1998, and the Mid-Career Research Faculty Award in 2004 and the Senior Research Faculty Award in 2011 at UC Davis.
Prof Federico Corradi, Eindhoven University of Technology
Dr Federico Corradi is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the Eindhoven University of Technology. His research activities are in Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering and span from the development of efficient models of computation to novel microelectronic architectures, with CMOS and emerging technologies, for both efficient deep learning and brain-inspired algorithms. His long-term research goal is to understand the principles of computation in natural neural systems and apply those for the development of a new generation of energy-efficient sensing and computing technologies. His research outputs find use in several application domains as robotics, machine vision, temporal signal processing, and biomedical signal analysis. Dr. Federico Corradi is leading the Neuromorphic Edge Computing Systems Lab.
Dr. Corradi received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Zurich in Neuroinformatics and an international Ph.D. from the ETH Neuroscience Centre Zurich in 2015. He was a Postgraduate at the institute of Neuroinformatics in 2018. From 2015 to 2018, he worked in the Institute of Neuroinformatics’ spin-off company Inilabs, developing event-based cameras and neuromorphic processors. From 2018 to 2022, he was at IMEC, the Netherlands, where he started a group focusing on neuromorphic ICs design activities. His passion for research recently brought him back to academia while keeping strong ties with startups and companies. He is an active review editor of Frontiers in Neuromorphic Engineering, IEEE, and other international journals. In addition, he currently serves as a technical program committee member of several machine learning and neuromorphic symposiums and conferences (ICTOPEN, ICONS, DSD, EUROMICRO).
Prof Volker Sorger, George Washington University
Dr Volker J. Sorger is a Full Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director of the Institute on AI & Photonics, the Head of the Devices & Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the George Washington University. His research areas include devices & optoelectronics, AI/ML accelerators, mixed-signal ASICs, quantum processors, cryptography. For his work, Dr. Sorger received multiple awards including the Presidential PECASE Award, the AFOSR YIP, the Emil Wolf Prize, and the National Academy of Sciences award of the year. Dr. Sorger is Editor for Optica, Nanophotonics, Applied Physics Rev., eLight, Chips, and was the former editor-in-chief of Nanophotonics. He carries the honor of ‘Fellow’ of The Optical Society (former OSA), SPIE, International Association of Advanced Materials (IAAM), and The German National Academic Foundation, and is a Senior Member of IEEE. He published over 400 scholarly works and more then 20 patents. He is a founder of Optelligence.
Dr Alice Mizrahi, Thales
Dr Alice Mizrahi is a researcher at Thales, within the Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/Thales. Her work interests include neuromorphic computing with nano-scale dynamical systems, and in particular spintronics devices. She completed her PhD at the Université Paris Saclay and a postdoc at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA) before joining Thales in 2018.
Prof Christophe Moser, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Dr Christophe Moser is Associate Professor of Optics and the Section Director in the Microengineering department at EPFL. He obtained his PhD at the California Institute of Technology in optical information processing in 2000. He co-founded and was the CEO of Ondax Inc (acquired by Coherent Inc.), Monrovia California for 10 years before joining EPFL in 2010. His current interests are ultra-compact endoscopic optical imaging through multimode fibers, multimode fiber lasers, retinal imaging and additive manufacturing via volumetric 3D printing with light. He is the co-founder of Composyt light lab in the field of head worn displays in 2014 (acquired by Intel Corp), Earlysight SA and Readily3D. He is the author and co-author of 75 peer reviewed publications and 45 patents.
Agenda
