Seminar: Elisabetta Chicca (CITEC - Bielefeld University) - Learning in silico beyond STDP

Synaptic plasticity empowers biological nervous systems with the ability to learn from experience and adjust to environmental changes. Such abilities are a must for artificial autonomous systems and therefore researchers have been devoting significant efforts to the understanding and modelling of plasticity mechanisms. In particular, the field of neuromorphic engineering focuses on the development of full-custom hybrid analog/digital electronic systems for the implementation of models of biological computation and learning in hardware. I will give a short historical overview of the most important plasticity circuits developed following the approach originally proposed by Carver Mead in the late eighties. Afterwards, I will present recent advancements in this field.

Contact & more about Elisabetta:

Elisabetta Chicca obtained a "Laurea" degree (M.Sc.) in Physics from the University of Rome 1 "La Sapienza", Italy in 1999, a Ph.D. in Natural Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ, Physics department) and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Neuroscience Center Zurich, in 2006. E. Chicca has carried out her research as a Postdoctoral fellow (2006-2010) and as a Group Leader (2010-2011) at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (University of Zurich and ETH Zurich) working on development of neuromorphic signal processing and sensory systems. Since 2011 she is leading the Neuromorphic Behaving Systems research group at Bielefeld University (Faculty of Technology and Cognitive Interaction Technology Center of Excellence, CITEC). Her current interests are in the development of VLSI models of cortical circuits for brain-inspired computation, learning in spiking VLSI neural networks and memristor based systems, bio-inspired sensing (olfaction, active electrolocation, audition) and motor control.

e-mail: chicca cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de