Congratulations to Ananna Biswas for receiving NSF AccelNet NeuroPAC fellowship Award.  NeuroPAC is an NSF-supported effort under the AccelNet (Accelerating Research through International Network-to-Network Collaborations) program, led by the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University. Its goal is to network internationally neuromorphic engineers with computational neuroscientists, roboticists, and researchers of computational theory, control, and perception to advance the foundations of Neuromorphic Intelligence. 

We deeply appreciate the support from NSF and the NeuroPAC committee. We hope Ananna will have a fruitful research experience at the University of Southern California.

Congratulations to Md Abu Bakr Siddique for successfully defending his master's thesis titled "The Integration of neuromorphic computing in autonomous robotic systems" on April 5, 2024. His thesis research implements associative learning with an autonomous robot for an online learning scenario. This system emulates the classic associative learning of rats in T-maze. Abu Bakr will join the University of Florida for his doctoral study. We wish Abu good luck in his future research. 

Really appreciate the hard work of the students throughout 2022 and 2023!  We enjoyed the time and dinner with Dr. Zhang's group and look forward to more collaborations and a more fruitful 2024!

Congratulations to Noah Zins on receiving the Matt Wolfe Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant Award! 

Matt Wolfe was a 1992 BSEE graduate and MS degree candidate in Electrical Engineering who was tragically killed in an automobile accident during his second year of graduate study. He was an outstanding student; his research work and interactions with other students, both graduate and undergraduate, were exemplary. His family established this endowed award in his memory and is awarded each year to the ECE Department's outstanding research assisant.

Congratulations to Noah Zins for successfully defending his master's thesis titled "Neuromorphic Computing Applications in Robotics" on Aug. 2, May 2023. His thesis research implements associative learning with an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and neuromorphic hardware (Intel’s Loihi) for an online learning scenario. This system emulates the classic associative learning in rats using the UGV in place of the rats. Specifically, it successfully reproduces fear conditioning with no pretraining procedure or labeled datasets. The UGV is rendered capable of autonomously learning the cause-and-effect relationship of the light stimulus and vibration stimulus and exhibiting a movement response to demonstrate memorization. Hebbian learning dynamics are used to update the synaptic weights during the associative learning process. The Intel Loihi chip is integrated with this online learning system for processing visual signals with a specialized neural assembly. Noah will join the industry. We wish Noah good luck in his industry career!

After three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are immensely pleased that we attended the ISQED in San Francisco, CA, in April 2023. We presented our latest work, "Reproducing Fear Conditioning of Rats with Unmanned Ground Vehicles and Neuromorphic Systems," which demonstrates the fear conditioning of rats using neuromorphic computing and mobile robots.

Congratulations to Noah Zins on receiving the Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award!