Telluride Workshops

[Terry Sejnowski]

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION IN TWO WORKSHOPS ON "NEUROMORPHIC  ENGINEERING"

             JULY 3 - 9, 1994  AND  JULY 10 -  16,  1994

                       TELLURIDE, COLORADO

Christof Koch (Caltech) and Terry Sejnowski (Salk Institute/UCSD)
invite applications for two different workshops that will be held in 
Telluride, Colorado in July 1994. Travel and housing expenses will be 
provided for ten to twenty active researchers for each workshop.

Deadline for application is March 10, 1994. 

GOALS:

Carver Mead has introduced the term "Neuromorphic Engineering" for a new field  
based on the design and fabrication of artificial neural systems, such as 
vision systems, head-eye systems, and roving robots, whose architecture and 
design principles are based on those of biological nervous systems. The goal 
of these workshops is to bring together young investigators and more 
established researchers from academia with their counterparts in industry 
and national laboratories, working on both neurobiological as well as 
engineering aspects of sensory systems and sensory-motor integration. The 
focus of the workshop will be on ``active" participation, with 
demonstration systems and hands-on-experience for all participants. 

Neuromorphic engineering has a wide range of applications from nonlinear 
adaptive control of complex systems to the design of smart sensors. Many of 
the fundamental principles in this field, such as the use of learning methods 
and the design of parallel hardware, are inspired by biological systems. 
However, existing applications are modest and the challenge of scaling up 
from small artificial neural networks and designing completely autonomous 
systems at the levels achieved by biological systems lies ahead. The
assumption underlying these workshops is that the next generation of 
neuromorphic systems would benefit from closer attention to the principles 
found through experimental and theoretical studies of brain systems.

WORKSHOPS:

                  NEUROMORPHIC ANALOG VLSI SYSTEMS 
               Sunday, July 3 to Saturday, July 9, 1994

Organized by Rodney Douglas (Oxford), Misha Mahowald (Oxford) 
and Stephen Lisberger (UCSF). 

The goal of this week is to bring together biologists and engineers who are 
interested in exploring neuromorphic systems through the medium of analog VLSI. 
The workshop will cover methods for the design and fabrication of 
multi-chip neuromorphic systems. This framework is suitable both for 
creating analogs of specific biological systems, which can serve as a 
modeling environment for biologists, and as a tool for engineers to 
create cooperative circuits based on biological principles. 
The workshop will provide the community with a 
common formal language for describing neuromorphic systems. 

Equipment will be present for participants to evaluate 
existing neuromorphic chips (including silicon retina, silicon neurons, 
oculomotor system). 


                SYSTEMS LEVEL MODELS OF VISUAL BEHAVIOR
               Sunday, July 10 to Saturday, July 16, 1994 

Organized by Dana Ballard (Rochester) and Richard Andersen (Caltech).

The goal of this week is to bring together biologists and engineers who are 
interested in systems level modeling of visual behaviors and their 
interactions with the motor systems.

Sessions will cover issues of sensory-motor integration in the mammalian 
brain. Special emphasis will be placed on understanding  neural algorithms 
used by the brain which can provide insights into constructing electrical 
circuits which can accomplish similar tasks.  Issues to be covered will include 
spatial localization and constancy, attention, motor planning, eye 
movements, and the use of visual motion information for motor control.  
Two or three prominent neuroscientists will be invited to give lectures on 
the above subjects. These researchers will also be asked to bring their own 
demonstrations, classroom experiments, and software for computer models. 

Demonstrations include recording eye movements and simple eye 
movement psychophysical experiments, neural network models for 
coordinate transformations and the representation of space, visual 
attention psychophysical experiments. Participants can conduct their own 
experiments using the Virtual Reality equipment. 

FORMAT:

Time in both workshops will be divided between planned presentation, free 
interaction, and contributed material. Each day will consist of a lecture in 
the morning that covers the theory behind the hands-on investigation in the 
afternoon. Following each lecture, there will be a demonstration that 
introduces participants to the equipment that will be available in the 
afternoon session. Participants will be free to explore and play with whatever 
they choose in the afternoon. Participants are encouraged to bring their own 
material to share with others. After dinner, time for participants to provide 
an informal lecture/demonstration is reserved.  

LOCATION AND ARRANGEMENTS:

The two workshops will take place at the "Telluride Summer Research 
Center," located in the small  town of Telluride, 9000 feet high in Southwest 
Colorado, about 6 hours away from Denver (350 miles) and 4 hours from 
Aspen. Continental and United Airlines provide many daily flights directly 
into Telluride. Participants will be housed in shared condominiums, 
within walking distance of the Center. 

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 talk about 
their work or to bring demonstrators to Telluride (e.g. robots, chips, 
software). 

We expect to be able to pay for shipping necessary equipment 
to Telluride and will have at least three technical staff present 
throughout both workshops to assist us with software and hardware 
problems. We will have a network of  SUN workstations running UNIX and 
connected to the Internet at the Center available to us. 

All domestic travel and housing expenses will be provided. 
Participants are expected to pay for food and incidental expenses. 

HOW TO APPLY:

The deadline for receipt of applications is March 10, 1994

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

Each participant can apply for only one workshop and the application should include:

1. Name, address, telephone, e-mail, FAX, and and minority status (optional).
2. Resume.
3. One page summary of background and interests relevant to the workshop.
4. Description of special equipment needed for demonstrations.
5. Two letters of recommendation

Complete applications should be sent to:

Prof. Terrence Sejnowski
The Salk Institute
Post Office Box 85800
San Diego, CA 
92186-5800

Applicants will be notified by April 15, 1994.