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Day 10 - BMIs with neuromorphic substrates: Francesca Santoro, Elisa Donati, Jean-Jacques Slotine

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Approaching Capocaccia by speedboats 🌞 On Day 10, we explored how neuromorphic systems can interface with the brain and help us understand learning itself.   Francesca Santoro showed how organic electronics can mimic synaptic behavior and physically integrate with biological nets, opening the door to biocompatible and future intelligent implants.  Elisa Donati demonstrated that neuromorphic twins, real-time spiking replicas of brain areas, can help restore lost neural communication and even replicate human sensory adaptation.  Jean-Jacques Slotine connected neuroscience and deep learning through contraction theory, revealing how high-dimensional systems like the brain or artificial deep neural nets can achieve stability, generalization, and attention through their geometry. Francesca Santoro: Engineering Organic Neuromorphics What if the materials we use to interface with the brain were as soft, adaptive, and chemically dynamic as the brain itself? Francesc...

Day 9 - Bio-Inspired RNNs (Dan Goodman, Panayiota Poirazi, Susan Stepney, Emre Neftci)

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The CCW25 T-shirt logo, designed by Kieran Nazareth In this session, we took a look at the underpinnings of the brain's efficiency, the computational power of physical objects, and a new perspective on the inner workings of transformers. Freeform   Sketches by Stan Kerstjens Dan Goodman: Brain Efficiency, Communication and Organization Dan Goodman kicked things off with a tongue-in-cheek provocation: "feel free to ignore everything that neuroscientists tell you about how the brain works." His point wasn't to dismiss neuroscience, but to highlight that our understanding is far from complete. While detailed theories might be flawed, they can be hints towards new insights: The Brain's Surprisingly Low Energy Bill: The brain seems to average about 0.1 spikes per neuron per second. This implies an incredibly sparse code, far sparser than many theories accommodate. If a theory requires neurons to fire at 100 spikes/second, then only a tiny fraction (0.1%) can be acti...