Telluride Workshop deadline

[Terry Sejnowski]

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                      NEUROMORPHIC ENGINEERING WORKSHOP
 
                 Sunday, JUNE 29 - Saturday, JULY 19, 2003
 
                            TELLURIDE, COLORADO
 
                   http://www.ini.unizh.ch/telluride/
 
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             Avis COHEN (University of Maryland)
             Rodney DOUGLAS (Institute of Neuroinformatics,
                             UNI/ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
             Timmer HORIUCHI (Johns Hopkins University)
             Giacomo INDIVERI (Institute of Neuroinformatics,
                               UNI/ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
             Christof KOCH (California Institute of Technology)
             Terrence SEJNOWSKI (Salk Institute and UCSD)
             Shihab SHAMMA (University of Maryland)
 
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We invite applications for the annual three week "Telluride Workshop
and Summer School on Neuromorphic Engineering" that will be held in
Telluride, Colorado from Sunday, June 29 to Saturday, July 19, 2003.
The application deadline is FRIDAY, MARCH 14, and application
instructions are described at the bottom of this document.

Like each of these workshops that have taken place since 1994, the
2002 Workshop and Summer School on Neuromorphic Engineering, sponsored
by the National Science Foundation, the Whitaker Foundation, the
Office of Naval Research, the Defence Advanced Research Projects
Agency, and by the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering at the
California Institute of Technology, was an exciting event and a great
success. 

We strongly encourage interested parties to browse through the
previous workshop web pages located at:
http://www.ini.unizh.ch/telluride

For a discussion of the underlying science and technology and a report
on the 2001 workshop, see the September 20, 2001 issue of "The Economist":
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=779503 

  GOALS:

Carver Mead 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 this workshop 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, vision,
speech understanding and robotics.  Many of the fundamental principles
in this field, such as the use of learning methods and the design of
parallel hardware (with an emphasis on analog and asynchronous digital
VLSI), 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 this three week workshop is that the next
generation of neuromorphic systems would benefit from closer attention
to the principles found through experimental and theoretical studies
of real biological nervous systems as whole systems.

  FORMAT:

The three week summer school will include background lectures on
systems neuroscience (in particular learning, oculo-motor and other
motor systems and attention), practical tutorials on analog VLSI
design, small mobile robots (Koalas, Kheperas, LEGO robots, and
biobugs), 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,
the majority of these lectures will be tutorials, rather than detailed
reports of current research.  These lectures will be given by invited
speakers. Participants will be free to explore and play with whatever
they choose in the afternoon.  Projects and interest groups meet in
the late afternoons, and after dinner.  In the early afternoon there
will be tutorial on a wide spectrum of topics, including analog VLSI,
mobile robotics, auditory systems, central-pattern-generators,
selective attention mechanisms, etc.

Projects that are carried out during the  workshop will be centered in
a number of working groups, including:
* active  vision
* audition
* motor control
* central  pattern generator
* robotics
* swarm robotics
* multichip communication
* analog VLSI
* learning

The active perception project group will emphasize vision and human
sensory-motor coordination.  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.

The central pattern generator group will focus on small walking and
undulating robots.  It will look at characteristics and sources of
parts for building robots, play with working examples of legged and
segmented robots, and discuss CPG's and theories of nonlinear
oscillators for locomotion.  It will also explore the use of simple
analog VLSI sensors for autonomous robots.

The robotics group will use rovers and working digital vision boards
as well as other possible sensors to investigate issues of
sensorimotor integration, navigation and learning.

The audition group aims to develop biologically plausible algorithms
and aVLSI implementations of specific auditory tasks such as source
localization and tracking, and sound pattern recognition. Projects
will be integrated with visual and motor tasks in the context of a
robot platform.

The multichip communication project group will use existing interchip
communication interfaces to program small networks of artificial
neurons to exhibit particular behaviors such as amplification,
oscillation, and associative memory.  Issues in multichip
communication will be discussed.

This year we will also have *200* biobugs, kindly donated by the
WowWee Toys division of Hasbro in Hong Kong.  B.I.O.-Bugs, short for
Bio-mechanical Integrated Organisms, are autonomous creatures, each
measuring about one foot and weighing about one pound
(www.wowwee.com/biobugs/biointerface.html).  This will permit us to
carry out experiments in collective/swarm robotics.


  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).  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 also
plan to provide wireless internet access and 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 ARRANGEMENT:

Notification of acceptances will be mailed out around mid April 2003.
Participants are expected to pay a $275.00 workshop fee at that time
in order to reserve a place in the workshop.  The cost of a shared
condominium will be covered for all academic participants but upgrades
to a private room will cost extra.  Participants from National
Laboratories and Industry are expected to pay for these condominiums.
Travel reimbursement of up to $500 for US domestic travel and up to
$800 for overseas travel will be possible if financial help is needed
(Please specify on the application).

  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 qualified women and minority candidates to apply.

Application should include:
* First name, Last name, Affiliation, valid e-mail address.
* Curriculum Vitae.
* One page summary of background and interests relevant to the
  workshop.
* Description of demonstrations that could be brought to the 
  workshop.
* Two letters of recommendation

Complete applications should be sent to:

Terrence Sejnowski
The Salk Institute
10010 North Torrey Pines Road
San Diego, CA 92037
e-mail: telluride at salk.edu
FAX: (858) 587 0417

APPLICATION DEADLINE: MARCH 14, 2003