Real-time gesture interface based on event-driven processing from stereo silicon retinas.

We propose a real-time hand gesture interface based on combining a stereo pair of biologically inspired event-based dynamic vision sensor (DVS) silicon retinas with neuromorphic event-driven postprocessing. Compared with conventional vision or 3-D sensors, the use of DVSs, which output asynchronous and sparse events in response to motion, eliminates the need to extract movements from sequences of video frames, and allows significantly faster and more energy-efficient processing. In addition, the rate of input events depends on the observed movements, and thus provides an additional cue for solving the gesture spotting problem, i.

Fast neuromorphic sound localization for binaural hearing aids.

We report on the neuromorphic sound localization circuit which can enhance the perceptual sensation in a hearing aid system. All elements are simple leaky integrate-and-fire neuron circuits with different parameters optimized to suppress the impacts of synaptic circuit noises. The detection range and resolution of the proposed neuromorphic circuit are 500 us and 5 us, respectively.

Observation of methanol behavior in fuel cells in situ by NMR spectroscopy.

The chemical conversion of methanol in direct methanol fuel cells was followed in situ by NMR spectroscopy. Comparing data of the methanol oxidation on Pt and PtRu anode catalysts allowed the role of Ru in both Faradaic and non-Faradaic reactions to be investigated. The spatial distributions of chemicals could also be determined.

Self-organized criticality and scale-free properties in emergent functional neural networks.

Recent studies on complex systems have shown that the synchronization of oscillators, including neuronal ones, is faster, stronger, and more efficient in small-world networks than in regular or random networks. We show that the functional structures in the brain can be self-organized to both small-world and scale-free networks by synaptic reorganization via spike timing dependent synaptic plasticity instead of conventional Hebbian learning rules. We show that the balance between the excitatory and the inhibitory synaptic inputs is critical in the formation of the functional structure, which is found to lie in a self-organized critical state.