Chris Eliasmith has just been named an inaugural member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars. The inaugural cohort is 92 top faculty members from across Canada. Chris is a pioneering figure in the rapidly developing field of theoretical neuroscience. His most visible contribution has been in the development of Spaun, the world’s largest functional model of the brain. Spaun has garnered wide acclaim, both in the academy and in the popular press. Behind Spaun’s success is a deeply influential body of work implementing an innovative approach to the problem of how brains encode meaning.

College Member Citations 2014

Official press release - Sept. 16, 2014

Chris is a professor in the Philosophy department and Systems Design Engineering. He is also the director of the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience and a Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Neuroscience.

Our friends in the Computer Architecture Group at the University of Cambridge have Nengo running on an FPGA board with a multi-touch screen. Here's a demo in which they do character recognition quickly and accurately!

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The province of Ontario's Research Matters initiative hosted an event called "What Matters Now" in Hamilton. Our very own Chris Eliasmith was invited to speak about our work at the CNRGlab.

Skip to 35:50 for Chris's talk.

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Chris recently paid a visit to the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, where he talked about the complexities of large-scale brain models. It's a great talk if you're curious about what we do at the CNRG and want more detail than Chris's 10-minute TEDx talk.

Eleven members of the CNRG were in Berlin recently for the 35th meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Now that Spaun has been published, we're branching out in several domains to make the next generation of Spaun even more impressive.

Xuan Choo presented a new general instruction following task that can be done by Spaun and other models using the Semantic Pointer Architecture. [Paper, Slides]

Terry Stewart presented a poster which described a new, more general way to communicate with Spaun. [Paper, Poster]

Eric Hunsberger presented improvements to Spaun's vision system, and applied it to image categorization, matching human performance in two well-known tasks. [Paper, Slides]

Aziz Hurzook and Oliver Trujillo presented a poster describing a novel model that can process motion in the visual field, and make decisions based on that motion. [Paper, Poster]

Trevor Bekolay presented improvements to how Spaun learns, and showed that this learning mechanism could be how something like Spaun might develop. [Paper, Slides]

Peter Blouw presented a poster describing a simple way to encode large vocabularies in order to extract semantic meaning of words that can be readily implemented in a neural model like Spaun. [Paper, Poster]

Eric Crawford presented a method to encode human-scale knowledge (e.g., the words that would be used in Peter's work) in a tiny amount of simulated cortex. [Paper, Slides]

And last but not least, Daniel Rasmussen presented a poster describing a model that solves reinforcement learning tasks with unknown time delays with spiking neurons. [Paper, Poster]

Not only did we have nine papers accepted, four CNRG members also received generous travel awards. Eric Hunsberger and Daniel received EUCog travel awards, and Trevor and Xuan received AI Journal travel awards. Congratulations to all!

But that's not all! Our fearless leader Chris Eliasmith and Terry spent the whole first day of the conference giving a tutorial on Nengo, the software that we use to make large-scale neural models. [Writeup]

Berlin was a lot of fun, and we're looking forward to attending Cognitive Science 2014 in Quebec City next July!