ABOUT THE GROUP

Computational approaches to understanding brain function form an important and growing area of interdisciplinary research. Gaining a detailed understanding of human brain has been termed one of the grandest challenges of the 21st century. The grandness of the challenge and the requirement of diverse forms of expertise necessitate synergistic interactions among neurobiologists, computer scientists and electrical engineers. Many different faculty members interested in different aspects of this problem have recently come together and formed an informal research group (also called a thematic cluster) on Neuromorphic Engineering and Computation. This group comprises of more than twenty faculty members from seven different departments (namely, CSA, EE, ECE, ESE, CDS, CNS and MBU) pointing to the interdisciplinary nature of this research endeavour. The group includes researchers in experimental and theoretical neurobiology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, signal processing, electronic systems, hybrid (electronic and neural) hardware systems etc.

The current work of this group spans the areas of Neuromorphic hardware and hybrid systems, computational models for representation and processing of sensory (e.g., vision, speech, language) information in brain, computational models of biological neurons, neural plasticity, models of learning, signal processing, machine learning, big data analytics, large scale computational models etc.

The vision of this group is to make significant break-troughs in our understanding of brain leading to what may be termed an Indian Brain Project.

Research Areas

• Computational Neuroscience
• Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering
• Data Science
• Machine Learning
• Brain Inspired Algorithms
• Signal Processing
• Image Analysis

PRATIKSHA TRUST

Pratiksha Trust, founded by Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan and Mrs. Sudha Gopalakrishnan has been extending a very generous support to IISc in promoting research in Brain Science, data science and computing architectures and algorithms inspired by the brain. The Pratiksha Trust has made a generous endowment for three distinguished visiting chairs at IISc in the general areas of neuromorphic computating, computational neuroscience, machine learning and data science. Many other academic activities related to the research of this group are also supported by this endowment.