Keynotes

Chiara Bartolozzi

Italian Institute of Technology, Italy

Title: Neuromorphic sensing and perception for robots

Biodata: Chiara Bartolozzi is Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology. She earned a degree in Engineering at University of Genova (Italy) and a Ph.D. in Neuroinformatics at ETH Zurich, developing analog subthreshold circuits for emulating biophysical neuronal properties onto silicon and modelling selective attention on hierarchical multi-chip systems.
She is currently leading the Event-Driven Perception for Robotics group, with the aim of applying the "neuromorphic" engineering approach to the design of robotic platforms as enabling technology towards the design of autonomous machines.
This goal is pursued by inducing a paradigm shift in robotics, based on the emerging concept of Event-Driven (ED) sensing and processing. Similarly to their biological counterpart, and differently from traditional robotic sensors, ED sensory systems sample their input signal at fixed (and relative) amplitude changes, intrinsically adapting to the dynamics of the sensory signal: temporal resolution is extremely high for fast transitory signals and decreases for slower inputs. This approach naturally leads to better robots that acquire, transmit and process information only when needed, optimising the use of resources, leading to real-time, low-cost, operation. Chiara has participated to a number of EU funded projects, she is currently coordinating the European Training Network "NeuTouch", where 15 PhD students are studying how touch perception works in humans and animals, in order to develop artificial touch perception systems for robots and hand prosthesis. As leader of the educational activities of the coordination and support action NEUROTECH, she is co-organising the Neuromorphic Colloquium, a series of online events to build up educational material for the next generation of neuromorphic researchers.
She is an IEEE member, actively supporting the CAS and RAS societies. In 2020, she has co-chaired "AICAS2020", on Circuits and systems for efficient embedded AI.

Laurent Fesquet

TIMA Laboratory, Grenoble INP, Grenoble, France

Title: Designing Event-Based Electronics

Abstract: Today, the Internet and the Communication Technologies (ICT) exchange large data streams. The amount of data is incredibly huge and the future promises new data communications between humans and technological equipment such as robots, cars, planes, etc. Nevertheless, this data orgy wastes a lot of energy, which today represents more than 10% of the consumed energy in the world. Even if it exists relevant and promising solutions to reduce the amount of data by employing non- uniform and sparse sampling, it appears important to develop electronic circuits able to benefit from such sampling strategies. Therefore, event-driven (or clockless) circuits are especially attractive for leveraging from events and sparse sampling techniques. As they are not clock-driven, they do not compute an excess of data, nor produce useless computation, storage or communications. This electronics leads to more robust and power efficient circuits. The talk presents how a synchronous circuit designer can evolve to event-driven circuits by applying a set of simple ideas and differently exploiting the commercial CAD tools.

Biodata: Laurent Fesquet (IEEE M'99, S'09), received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France, in 1997. In 1995, he was a Lecturer in charge of electronics and inertial navigation systems with the French Navy Instruction Center. In 1999, he joined the Grenoble Institute of Technology, Grenoble, France, as an Associate Professor. Since 2008, he has been Deputy Director of CIME Nanotech, an academic center that supports microelectronic teaching and research activities. His research, initially focused on asynchronous circuit design, also addresses non-uniform sampling techniques in order to enhance the analog-to-digital conversion. He has also been the program chair of the two first editions of the Event-based Control, Communication and Signal Processing conference (EBCCSP) and co-general chair of the 2020 edition. His current research at the TIMA Laboratory today covers asynchronous circuit design, computer-aided design (CAD) for event-based systems and non-uniform signal processing. He is currently the deputy director of the TIMA laboratory.

Maurice Heemels

Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

This keynote has been rescheduled for EBCCSP2023

Maurice Heemels received the M.Sc. degree in mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in control theory (both summa cum laude) from the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1995 and 1999, respectively. After being an Assistant Professor at the Electrical Engineering department at TU/e and a research fellow at the Embedded Systems Institute (ESI), he is currently a Full Professor in the Control Systems Technology Group at the Mechanical Engineering department at TU/e. Maurice held visiting research positions at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland (2001), at Océ, Venlo, the Netherlands (2004) and at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA (2008). He was awarded a prestigious VICI grant entitled “Wireless control systems: A new frontier in automation,” served/s on the editorial board of the journals “Automatica” and “Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems” and as general/IPC chair of IFAC ADHS 2012, IPC chair of IFAC NECSYS 2013 and IPC-co chair of ECC 2013 next to serving in numerous IPCs. His current research interests include control theory, hybrid and cyber-physical systems, networked, wireless and event-triggered control and constrained systems including model predictive control.

Mingoo Seok

Columbia University, USA

This keynote has been rescheduled for EBCCSP2023

Mingoo Seok is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University since 2012. He received the BS (with summa cum laude) in electrical engineering from Seoul National University, South Korea, in 2005, and the MS and PhD degree from University of Michigan in 2007 and 2011, respectively, all in electrical engineering. He has spent about a year as a member of technical staff in the Systems and Applications R&D; Center of Texas Instruments, Dallas, Texas. He has a research interest in energy-efficient and high performance VLSI circuit and system design, cyber physical systems, ubiquitous sensing and computing, and system on chip design. He received 1999 Distinguished Undergraduate Scholarship from the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies, 2005 Doctoral Fellowship from the same organization, and 2008 Rackham Pre- Doctoral Fellowship from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He also won 2009 AMD/CICC Scholarship Award for picowatt voltage reference work and 2009 DAC/ISSCC Design Contest for the 35pW sensor platform design (a.k.a. Phoenix Processor). He holds one pending international patent.