The International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems, Western Sydney University, invites both domestic and international students to apply for the world’s first Master of Neuromorphic Engineering courses. We offer several programs, including a Graduate Certificate, a Graduate Diploma, a 1.5-year industry-oriented degree and a two-year research-oriented Master’s course in Neuromorphic Engineering. We seek dedicated, curious and open-minded scientists, engineers, physicists, electronics tinkerers, hardware and software hackers, and roboticists from diverse backgrounds. The course builds on the research background of our Neuromorphic Engineering and Event-Based Processing research staff. Successful applicants will receive significant mentorship. Mentors and course instructors will equip students with special digital vision and audition processing capabilities which are rarely taught at other Universities in the world. Mentors and instructors will provide students with opportunities to apply skills learned to practical projects which align with industry need. Although the post graduate courses will equip graduates with many in-demand machine-learning techniques, Neuromorphic Engineering researchers go beyond status-quo Machine Learning so that they can find solutions to issues that block progress in AI machine learning sensing and computer vision. Neuromorphic Engineering seeks to progress beyond failures in regular machine learning approaches as conventional approaches usually fail to generalise, are not environmentally sustainable, and are poorly suited to high-stakes time-critical low-powered applications.

Two Postdoctoral Research Associates in Neurorobotics are required for a period of 48 months to work on the Horizon/InnovateUK project “PRIMI: Performance in Robots Interaction via Mental Imagery. This is a collaborative project of the University of Manchester’s Cognitive Robotics Lab with various academic and industry partners in the UK and Europe. PRIMI will synergistically combine research and development in neurophysiology, psychology, machine intelligence, cognitive mechatronics, neuromorphic engineering, and humanoid robotics to build developmental models of higher-cognition abilities – mental imagery, abstract reasoning, and theory of mind – boosted by energy- efficient event-driven computing and sensing. You will carry out research on robot neuro/cognitive architectures, using a combination of machine learning and robotics methodologies. You will be working collaboratively as part of the Cognitive Robotics Lab at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Professor Angelo Cangelosi.

A Postdoctoral Research Associates in Neuromorphic Systems and/or Computational Neuroscience for robotics is required for a period of 3.5 years to work on the Horizon/InnovateUK project “PRIMI: Performance in Robots Interaction via Mental Imagery. This is a collaborative project of the University of Manchester’s Cognitive Robotics Lab with various academic and industry partners in the UK and Europe. PRIMI will synergistically combine research and development in neurophysiology, psychology, machine intelligence, cognitive mechatronics, neuromorphic engineering, and humanoid robotics to build developmental models of higher-cognition abilities – mental imagery, abstract reasoning, and theory of mind – boosted by energy-efficient event-driven computing and sensing. You will carry out research on the design of neuromorphic systems models for robotics. The postdoc will work collaboratively with the other postdocs and PhD students in the PRIMI project. This post requires expertise in computational neuroscience (e.g. spiking neural networks) for robotics and/or neuromorphic systems.

A cross-disciplinary team of researchers from the Universities of Stirling, York, Cardiff, Manchester, and Southampton are working together on an EPSRC-funded project, Edgy Organism, to develop a novel end-to-end neuromorphic design approach drawing inspiration from how data is processed and represented in the brain and build an efficient hardware architecture based on spiking neural networks. The project aims to develop novel computing solutions, that can autonomously and reliably detect illegal or harmful activities in crowded public spaces, with minimum intrusion of personal space and privacy. We are recruiting a team of outstanding researchers from Visual Neuroscience, Psychology, Edge Computing, AI/ML, and Neuromorphic Engineering, to work with us on achieving Edgy Organism project’s ambitious objectives. As part of this project, Psychology, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling is offering a fixed term (27 months) full-time Postdoctoral Research Fellow position to work with Dr Elena Gheorghiu and the cross-disciplinary team of researchers.

We are looking for a motivated research assistant / engineer (“ingénieur d’étude” – IE) with expertise in neuromorphic engineering to join the team of Drs. Timothée Levi, Fabien Wagner, and Amélie Aussel at the University of Bordeaux (Institut du Matériau au Système – IMS – and Institut des Maladies Neurodégénératives – IMN). The goal of the project is to expand our current efforts towards performing large-scale simulations of conductance-based neuronal models on FPGAs, with an application to neurostimulation of the hippocampal formation. The initial contract would be for a period of 1 year with an expected starting date on Oct 1st, 2024.

The story of event cameras starts from the very beginnings of neuromorphic engineering with Misha Mahowald and Carver Mead. The chip design of these “silicon retina” cameras is the most crucial aspect that might enable them to come to mass production and widespread use. Once we have a usable camera is just the beginning, because now we need to think of our use of the data as though we were some type of artificial “silicon cortex”. That step has just started but the last few years have brought some remarkable results from the computer vision community. This talk will have a lot of live demonstrations.

The ability of the brain to encode and store information depends on the plastic nature of the individual synapses. The increase and decrease in synaptic strength, mediated through the structural plasticity of the spine, are important for learning, memory, and cognitive function. Dendritic spines are small structures that contain the synapse. They come in a variety of shapes (stubby, thin, or mushroom-shaped) and a wide range of sizes that protrude from the dendrite. These spines are the regions where the postsynaptic biochemical machinery responds to the neurotransmitters. Spines are dynamic structures, changing in size, shape, and number during development and aging. While spines and synapses have inspired neuromorphic engineering, the biophysical events underlying synaptic and structural plasticity of single spines remain poorly understood. Our current focus is on understanding the biophysical events underlying structural plasticity. I will discuss recent efforts from my group — first, a systems biology approach to construct a mathematical model of biochemical signaling and actin-mediated transient spine expansion in response to calcium influx caused by NMDA receptor activation and a series of spatial models to study the role of spine geometry and organelle location within the spine for calcium and cyclic AMP signaling. Second, I will discuss how mechanics of membrane-cytoskeleton interactions can give insight into spine shape region. And I will conclude with some new efforts in using reconstructions from electron microscopy to inform computational domains. I will conclude with how geometry and mechanics plays an important role in our understanding of fundamental biological phenomena and some general ideas on bio-inspired engineering.