An unconventional interdisciplinary hands-on workshop

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The neuromorphic engineering community, composed of neurbiologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, electronic engineers, roboticists and theoreticians have been trying to understand neural processing and computation from different perspectives. During the course of our research we try to solve the complex puzzle of the brain by identifying the relevant functions and features of each piece of the puzzle. The boundaries of the computational puzzle pieces, however, remain blurry and the puzzle itself is incomplete. Instead of highlighting the representational properties of the pieces of  the puzzle, as we did last year, the aim of Capo Caccia 2019 is to focus on the computational properties of the puzzle pieces, such as integration or goal-directed behaviour. Our goal is to connect these pieces, by identifying the operational definitions of computation and behaviour.

To make progress in this challenge we bring together experts from the different disciplines and organize open and frank brainstorming  sessions in the mornings and hands-on hacking and experiment sessions in the afternoons. In the evenings and nights we break off to smaller focused free-form discussions or carry on until late night with the hands-on experiments and work-groups.

The workshop is open to everybody, but since resources are limited, we will accept only a limited number of registrations, on a first-come first-serve basis.

Workshop details

In this workshop we will host a highly interactive and open discussion forum in which power-point presentations and beamer-slides are banned. Open discussion and brain-storming sessions will be interleaved with hands-on projects and work-groups. We encourage all participants to bring to the workshop their SW/HW tools in order to propose hands-on projects.

The workshop is organized by the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, and by iniForum

The workshop will be held at the Hotel dei Pini, in Alghero, Sardinia, Italy. Note that room reservations for workshop participants should only be made via the workshop registration page in order to use the "full-board" option (room + breakfast + lunch + dinner) with discounted prices.

Alghero airport is well connected and is host of several low-cost carriers. So if you book early in advance flights to Alghero are also very cheap.

In general the workshop is open to participants that
1) can best contribute and benefit to/from the workshop
2) can pay their travel + accommodation expenses
3) make reservations before the rooms are all booked out.
In addition we will give priority to PhD students who
4) stay for the full 2 weeks

There are only a small number of rooms available at the Hotel, so if you intend to participate, please register as soon as possible following the registration link.
Given the shortage of hotel rooms, PhD students are expected to pair up and share rooms.

Fellowships

NEUROTECH is a coordinated support action (CSA) funded by the European Commission with the aim to facilitate communication and technology exchange within the European Neuromorphic Technology research community. For more details see our web portal: http://neurotechai.eu 

The NEUROTECH Project offers  fellowships for students to cover part of the travel, registration, and accommodation cost for the workshop up to a maximum of 1.400 Euro.

Application deadline is February 3, 2019. The selection committee’s decision will be announced by February 28, 2019.

For more details see the fellowship application instructions

Invited discussion-leaders

As of previous years we were extremely lucky to gather world-leading experts to provide us with insights of their daily challenges and stimulate discussions on topics ranging from Development, Action & Movement to Large-scal Processing and Learning. Here is teaser for you. For more details see the schedule:

  1. The biophysical and artificial principles of computation: Kevan Martin & Matthew Cook  (beginning. 1st week)
  2. Filtering & Sensing: James Knight & Enea Ceolinie  (beginning 2nd week)
  3. Integration: Valerio Mante & Florian Engert (mid 2nd Week)
  4. Plasticity: Emre Neftci & David Kappel (mid 2nd Week)
  5. Motor learning: Richard Hahnloser & Gagan Narula (end 2nd Week)

These and many more topics and speakers are waiting for you at Capo Caccia. 

Invited discussion leaders
Name Date
Matthew Cook 23.04. - 04.05.
Kevan Martin 23.04. - 26.04.
Piotr Dudek 27.04. - 04.05.
Micheal Berry 23.04. - 02.05
Barry Richmond 23.04. - 27.04.
Richard Hahnloser 01.05. - 05.05.
Maneesh Sahani 27.04. - 05.05
and many more  

Workshop Schedule

The CapoCaccia Workshop schedule is typically organized around a "problem of the day" where one or moresession chairs organizes and moderates a discussion session around a theme central to the topic of this workshop. 
These sessions  are not 45min one-way presentations. Slides and power-point presentations are banned. Rather these sessions  are frank and open discussions that sould involve all the participants, as much as possible. 
We will provide flip-charts and a digitizing tablet to draw on (and eventually project pictures and data if absolutely necessary). The schedule will evolve and change very dynamically, on a daily or even hourly basis.

We will update the schedule frequently (e.g. on an hourly basis) and populate it with events, as participants volunteer to discuss about the topics listed. Please remember that this is not a talk-shop where people simply present their latest results with power-point slides.

A typical morning session day

A typical afternoon session day

The daily breaks and social events include:

Links

schedule

workgroups