People

Roll your mouse over a lab member's name for an overview of that person's research. Click for an expanded profile, including personal background, chip data, and publications.

Kwabena Boahen

Kwabena Boahen, PhD

boahen@stanford.edu

Being a scientist at heart, I want to understand how cognition arises from neuronal properties. Being an engineer by training, I am using silicon integrated circuits to emulate the way neurons compute, linking the seemingly disparate fields of electronics and computer science with neurobiology and medicine.
Bo Wen

Bo Wen, PhD

bwen@mit.edu

The human inner ear, namely the cochlea, functions as the front-end of the auditory pathway, turning sound into neural impulses that travel up to the cortex. My goal is to mimic the cochlea's nonlinear active behavior in silicon, while satisfying the engineering constraints of minimizing silicon area and power consumption.
Brian Taba

Brian Taba, PhD

brian.taba@alumni.upenn.edu

The ultimate goal is to make an artificial brain. The lab has had success devising the first stage, the silicon retina, which includes thirteen cell types. The cortex is more daunting, with billions of neurons, divided into an undetermined taxonomy. Rather than trace every circuit out by hand, I would like to devise a simple rule that can self-organize neural circuits automatically.
John V. Arthur

John V. Arthur, PhD

jarthur@stanford.edu

It is my goal to understand how the hippocampus functions as an episodic memory, and to apply this knowledge to build a hippocampal model in silicon. All three hippocampal regions—dentate gyrus, CA1, and CA3—are important in episodic memory and receive highly processed sensory data from the cortical hierarchy.
John V. Arthur

John H. Wittig Jr., PhD

john_wittig@yahoo.com

I am examining how anatomical and physiological specializations enable the mammalian nervous system to encode and enhance acoustic information. In particular, I am interested in early acoustic processing: encoding sound signals at the inner hair cell afferent synapse and enhancing sound features one synapse downstream at the cochlear nucleus.
Kai Michael Hynna

Kai Michael Hynna, PhD

kai.hynna@gmail.com

My thesis topic is the design of a silicon LGN (lateral geniculate nucleus). The LGN is the area within the thalamus through which retinal signals flow. It was originally thought to simply relay sensory information to cortex. However, the retinal input makes up only 1/4 of all afferents, which is quite low for "just a relay point".
Kareem Zagloul

Kareem Zagloul, MD, PhD

zaghloul@alum.mit.edu

My research involves quantifying some of the computations realized by the mammalian retina in order to model this first stage of visual processing in silicon. A study of the retina's seemingly simple architecture reveals several layers of complexity that underly its ability to convey visual information to higher cortical structures.
Paul A Merolla

Paul A Merolla, PhD

pmerolla@stanford.edu

I have always been impressed with the brain's ability to seamlessly integrate large numbers of input (sensory information) and output variables (motor output). What is it about the brain that makes it better at real-world applications? Can we understand its technique for efficiently coordinating massive amounts of data, and build similar systems in hardware?
Rodrigo Alvarez-Icaza

Rodrigo Alvarez-Icaza, MS

rodrigoa@stanford.edu

My interest is to populate the world with self-sufficient artificial agents that "live" and work among us. However, given the present state of technology, this will probably not occur during my lifetime and thus, for the time being, I have chosen to focus on removing a major obstacle by advancing the real-world interaction capabilities of robotic systems.
Anand Chandrasekaran

Anand Chandrasekaran, PhD

anandc@stanford.edu


The brain wires itself up and a significant fraction of those connections are highly specific. There is strong evidence that these specific connections are a result of activity dependent changes to the arbor structure of axons that innervate them. I am currently focused on implementing dynamic routing of axons based on activity dependent cues on chip.

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