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 for students and postdocs 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.