ERC Starting Grant for UG researcher Henk van Waarde

UG researcher Henk van Waarde, working at the Faculty of Science and Engineering and the Bernoulli Institute, has been awarded one of the ERC Starting Grants. The European Research Council's (ERC) Starting Grants amount to €1.5 million each, for a period of five years. The grants are intended for outstanding researchers with the aim of stimulating cutting-edge research in Europe.

Energy-based learning of complex dynamical systems (E-BLOCS)

Neuromorphic computing -an analog computing paradigm inspired by the human brain- offers the potential for substantially faster and more energy-efficient computation than conventional digital architectures. A key challenge, however, is how to train neuromorphic hardware efficiently. Existing machine-learning methods such as backpropagation are poorly suited to analog circuits as they require separate circuits for training and inference, thereby introducing energy-costly data transfer.

The ERC project of Henk van Waarde will address this challenge by developing a novel systems theory that views learning as the feedback interconnection between continuous-time circuit dynamics and optimization algorithms. This system-theoretic approach has the potential to lead to new energy-based learning algorithms that are fully decentralised, scalable, and robust to variations in physical circuit components.

Ultimately, the project aims to contribute to the mathematical foundations of physics-based learning and help pave the way towards more energy-efficient computing technologies.

About the ERC

The ERC aims to encourage promising young researchers in Europe to set up a research team and launch an independent research project to enable groundbreaking research. An ERC grant allows researchers to start their research project confidently.