Event Details:
Continue the conversation: Join the speaker for a complimentary dinner in the Theory Center (second floor of the neurosciences building) after the seminar
Spiking Manifesto
Abstract
Practically everything computers do is better, faster, and more power-efficient than the brain. For example, a calculator performs numerical computations more energy-efficiently than any human. Yet modern AI models are a thousand times less efficient than the brain. These models rely on large artificial neural networks (ANNs) to increase representational capacity and require GPUs to perform large-scale matrix multiplications. In contrast, the brain’s spiking neural networks (SNNs) exhibit factorially explosive encoding capacity and compute through the polychronization of spikes rather than explicit matrix–vector products, resulting in lower energy requirements. This manifesto proposes a framework for understanding popular AI models in terms of spiking networks and polychronization, and for interpreting spiking activity as nature's way of implementing look-up tables. This suggests a path toward converting AI models into a novel class of architectures with much smaller size yet combinatorially large representation capacity, offering the promise of a thousandfold improvement in performance. Code is available at https://github.com/izhikevich/SNN
Eugene Izhikevich
Founder and CEO of SpikeCore, San Diego, CA
Founder and Chairman of the Board of Brain Corp, San Diego, CA
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Scholarpedia - the peer-reviewed encyclopedia
Hosted by Youssef Faragalla (Baccus Lab)
Update: This seminar was originally scheduled to feature Dr. Alla Karpova; her talk has been postponed. We’re pleased to welcome Dr. Eugene Izhikevich as our speaker for this date.
About the Mind, Brain, Computation, and Technology (MBCT) Seminar Series
The Stanford Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology (MBCT) Seminars explore ways in which computational and technical approaches are being used to advance the frontiers of neuroscience.
The series features speakers from other institutions, Stanford faculty, and senior training program trainees. Seminars occur about every other week, and are held at 4:00 pm on Mondays at the Cynthia Fry Gunn Rotunda - Stanford Neurosciences E-241.
Questions? Contact neuroscience@stanford.edu
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