A short biography – Chiara Bartolozzi is senior researcher tenured at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. She earned a degree in Engineering (with honors) 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 principal investigator of the Event Driven Perception for Robotics group (www.edpr.iit.it), mainly working on the application of the “neuromorphic” engineering approach to the design of sensors and algorithms for robotic perception. Chiara has participated in a number of EU funded projects, she coordinated the H2020 MSCA-ETN “NeuTouch” and FP7 FET “eMorph”. She co-organised the Neuromorphic Colloquium, a series of online events to build up educational material for the next generation of neuromorphic researchers available athttps://neurotechai.eu/educational/. She is in the scientific board of the Capocaccia Workshop on Neuromorphic Intelligence. She is Editor for NPJ Robotics, IOP Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering, Frontiers in Neuroscience, IEEE JETCAS and TCASI.

Abstract: Unconventional sensing and perception: using event-driven technologies for robots

Biological sensory systems have developed to best capture the properties of surrounding objects and environment that are useful for acting in the world. The physical properties of tactile, visual and auditory sensory organs, and the way neurons encode the characteristics of each stimulus allow our brain to make sense of the world and take appropriate decisions on how to behave.

This is done by a very efficient system that spares the slightest bit of information, to avoid consuming too much energy for each single action. As such, artificial systems have much to learn from biology, to develop cheap solutions that can run in a very small device and at minimum energy cost. 

Since the first prototypes of neuromorphic vision sensors and computing devices, part of the community focused its efforts in deploying neuromorphic devices in practical applications, to exploit their intrinsic compression, low latency, high temporal resolution, high dynamic range.

The quest to find the best strategy to exploit neuromorphic engineering is still open, but a lot of progress has been made. In this talk, I’ll describe possible approaches towards the development of neuromorphic perception for robots and discuss the relevance of the development of neuromorphic sensing for touch and other modalities.