Speaker: Prof. Jordi Madrenas, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona.
Date/Time: 26th March 2008, 13.00-14:00.
Location: Room 101, Carrington Building (building 135).
Map: http://www.info.rdg.ac.uk/maps/maps-display.asp
Abstract:
Perplexus (www.perplexus.org) is a 6thFP EU-funded project aiming to develop a scalable hardware platform made of custom reconfigurable devices endowed with bio-inspired capabilities that will enable the simulation of large-scale complex systems and the study of emergent complex behaviours in a virtually unbounded wireless network of computing modules. At the heart of these ubiquitous computing modules (ubidules), we use a custom reconfigurable electronic device capable of implementing bio-inspired mechanisms such as growth, learning, and evolution. This reconfigurable circuit is associated with sensory elements and wireless communication capabilities. The Perplexus platform offers several advantages compared to classical software simulations: speed-up, an inherent real-time interaction with the environment, self-organization capabilities, simulation in the presence of uncertainty, and distributed multi-scale simulations. To prove our modelling infrastructure usefulness as a powerful and innovative simulation tool, it is to be tested in the following applications: neural networks, culture dissemination, and cooperative collective robotics modelling.
After introducing the Perplexus project and the ubidule, the speech will concentrate on the multiprocessor execution mode of the specific hardware, which is applied to massively parallel bioinspired neural networks emulation.
CV:
Jordi Madrenas received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in telecommunication engineering from the Technical University of Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, in 1986 and 1991, respectively. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Electronic Engineering, UPC. In 1989, he was granted an 18-month fellowship at the Electron-Beam Laboratory, University of Osaka, Japan, conducting research on e-beam testing of integrated circuits. In 1994, he spent six months at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, researching on analog implementations of neural models. He has participated in several European and national research projects on neural networks and field-programmable systems-on-chip. He currently coordinates a national research project on Reconfigurable MEMS (MicroElectroMechanical Systems) conditioning and participates in the Perplexus and Aether European Projects.
He has co-authored more than 90 scientific papers in journals and conference proceedings and 5 book chapters. His research interests include analog, mixed-signal and digital VLSI design, bioinspired system modelling and implementation, and programmable arrays.
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