*-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- **Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop*

*2015 Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop*

*Telluride, Colorado, June 28th - July 18th, 2015*

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: Deadline is April 2nd, 2015

NEUROMORPHIC COGNITION ENGINEERING WORKSHOP

www.ine-web.org

Sunday June 28th - Saturday July 18th, 2015, Telluride, Colorado

ine-web.org/workshops/workshops-overview/index.html and the workshop wiki is at https://neuromorphs.net/

GOALS:

Neuromorphic engineers design and fabricate artificial neural systems whose organizing principles are based on those of biological nervous systems. Over the past 18 years, this research community has focused on the understanding of low-level sensory processing and systems infrastructure; efforts are now expanding to apply this knowledge and infrastructure to addressing higher-level problems in perception, cognition, and learning. In this 3-week intensive workshop and through the Institute for Neuromorphic Engineering (INE), the mission is to promote interaction between senior and junior researchers; to educate new members of the community; to introduce new enabling fields and applications to the community; to promote on-going collaborative activities emerging from the Workshop, and to promote a self-sustaining research field.

FORMAT:

The three week summer workshop will include background lectures on systems and cognitive neuroscience (in particular sensory processing, learning and memory, motor systems and attention), practical tutorials on emerging hardware design, mobile robots, hands-on projects, and special interest groups. Participants are required to take part and possibly complete at least one of the projects proposed. They are furthermore encouraged to become involved in as many of the other activities proposed as interest and time allow. There will be two lectures in the morning that cover issues that are important to the community in general. Because of the diverse range of backgrounds among the participants, some of these lectures will be tutorials, rather than detailed reports of current research. These lectures will be given by invited speakers. Projects and interest groups meet in the late afternoons, and after dinner. In the early afternoon there will be tutorials on a wide spectrum of topics, including analog VLSI, mobile robotics, vision and auditory systems, central-pattern-generators, selective attention mechanisms, cognitive systems, etc.

*2015 TOPIC AREAS:*

*Human Auditory Cognition: Communicating with EEG and Virtual Reality Links (The Matrix)*: Shihab Shamma (UM-College Park), Malcolm Slaney (Microsoft), Edward Lalor (Trinity College, Dublin), and Alain de Cheveigne (UPMC, France)

*Manipulation Actions: Movements, Forces and Affordances: *Cornelia Fermüller (UMCP), Michael Pfeiffer (INI-UZH), Ryad Benosman (UPMC, Paris), and Andreas Andreou (JHU)

*Neuromorphic Natural Language Processing:* John Harris (UFL, Gainesville) and Chris Huyck (Middlesex University)

*Spike-Based Cognitive Computing: Seeing, Hearing, and Thinking with Spikes: *Arindam Basu (NTU, Singapore) and John Arthur (IBM Research Almaden)

*Computational Neuroscience (invitational mini-workshop)* : Terry Sejnowski (Salk Institute)

LOCATION AND ARRANGEMENTS:

The summer school will take place in the small town of Telluride, 9000 feet high in southwest Colorado, about 6 hours drive away from Denver (350 miles). Great Lakes Aviation and America West Express airlines provide daily flights directly into Telluride. All facilities within the beautifully renovated public school building are fully accessible to participants with disabilities. Participants will be housed in ski condominiums, within walking distance of the school. Participants are expected to share condominiums.

The workshop is intended to be very informal and hands-on. Participants are not required to have had previous experience in analog VLSI circuit design, computational or machine vision, systems level neurophysiology or modeling the brain at the systems level. However, we strongly encourage active researchers with relevant backgrounds from academia, industry and national laboratories to apply, in particular if they are prepared to work on specific projects, talk about their own work or bring demonstrations to Telluride (e.g. robots, chips, software). Wireless internet access will be provided. Technical staff present throughout the workshops will assist with software and hardware issues. We will have a network of PCs running LINUX and Microsoft Windows for the workshop projects. We encourage participants to bring along their personal laptop.

No cars are required. Given the small size of the town, we recommend that you do not rent a car. Bring hiking boots, warm clothes, rain gear, and a backpack, since Telluride is surrounded by beautiful mountains.

Unless otherwise arranged with one of the organizers, we expect participants to stay for the entire duration of this three week workshop.

FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENTS:

Notification of acceptances will be mailed out around the April 15th, 2015. The Workshop covers all your accommodations and facilities costs for the 3 weeks duration. You are responsible for your own travel to the Workshop, however, sponsored fellowships will be available as described below to further subsidize your cost.

Registration Fees: For expenses not covered by federal funds, a Workshop registration fee is required. The fee is TBD per participant for the 3-week Workshop. This is expected from all participants at the time of acceptance.

Accommodations: The cost of a shared condominium, typically a bedroom in a shared condo for senior participants or a shared room for students, will be covered for all academic participants. Upgrades to a private rooms or condos will cost extra. Participants from National Laboratories and Industry are expected to pay for these condominiums.

Fellowships: This year we will offer one Fellowship program to subsidize your costs:

The EU-CSNII Fellowship (http://csnetwork.eu/) which is funded by the 7th Research Framework Program FP7-ICT-CSNII-601167. The top 8 EU applicants will be reimbursed for their registration fees ($1250), subsistence/travel subsidy (up to Euro 2000) and accommodations cost ($1500). The registration and accommodation costs will go directly to the INE (the INE will reimburse them).

We invite applications for a three-week summer workshop that will be held in Telluride, Colorado. Sunday June 28th - Saturday July 18th, 2015. The application deadline is Wednesday, April 2nd and application instructions are described at the bottom of this document.

The 2015 Workshop and Summer School on Neuromorphic Engineering is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Institute of Neuromorphic Engineering, DARPA, Office of Naval Research, The EU-Collaborative Convergent Science Network (CNS-II), University of Maryland - College Park, Institute for Neuroinformatics – University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Georgia Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Boston University, University of Western Sydney and the Salk Institute.

Directors:

Cornelia Fermuller, University of Maryland, College Park

Ralph Etienne-Cummings, Johns Hopkins University

Shih-Chii Liu, Institute of Neuroinformatics, UNI/ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Timothy Horiuchi, University of Maryland, College Park

Workshop Advisory Board:

Andreas Andreou, Johns Hopkins University

Andre van Schaik, University Western Sydney, Australia

Avis Cohen, University of Maryland

Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, Boston University

Giacomo Indiveri, Institute of Neuroinformatics, Uni/Eth Zurich, Switzerland

Jonathan Tapson, University Western Sydney, Australia

Malcolm Slaney, Microsoft Research

Jennifer Hasler, Georgia Institute of Technology

Rodney Douglas, Institute of Neuroinformatics, Uni/Eth Zurich, Switzerland

Shihab Shamma, University of Maryland

Tobi Delbruck, Institute of Neuroinformatics, Uni/Eth Zurich, Switzerland

Previous year workshop can be found at: <http://ine-web.org/workshops/workshops-overview/index.html> participant’s registration fees after receipt from CSNII), while the subsistence/travel reimbursement will be provided directly to the participants by the CSNII at the University of Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.

HOW TO APPLY:

Applicants should be at the level of graduate students or above (i.e. postdoctoral fellows, faculty, research and engineering staff and the equivalent positions in industry and national laboratories). We actively encourage women and minority candidates to apply.

Anyone interested in proposing or discussing specific projects should contact the appropriate topic leaders directly.

The application website is (after February 23rd, 2015):

ine-web.org/telluride-conference-2015/apply-info

Application information needed:

Contact email address.

First name, Last name, Affiliation, valid e-mail address.

Curriculum Vitae (a short version, please).

One page summary of background and interests relevant to the workshop, including possible ideas for workshop projects. Please indicate which topic areas you would most likely join.

Two letters of recommendation (uploaded directly by references).

Applicants will be notified by e-mail.

23rd February, 2015 - Applications accepted on website

2nd April, 2015 - Applications Due

15th April, 2015 - Notification of Acceptance

-- Ralph Etienne-Cummings, PhD, FIEEE Professor and Chairman Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Computational Sensor Motor Systems Lab Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD [image: cid:image001.png@01CFC064.B58B46A0]

-- Ralph Etienne-Cummings, PhD, FIEEE Professor and Chairman Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Computational Sensor Motor Systems Lab Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD [image: cid:image001.png@01CFC064.B58B46A0]