Sam Fok (left) and Alexander Neckar
Two electrical engineering doctoral candidates, ALEXANDER NECKAR and SAM FOK, will share a 2012 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship. The fellowship provides the two with $100,000 to pursue future research interests and pairs them with research mentors at Qualcomm.
Fok, who is also supported by a Finch Family Fellowship through the School of Engineering, and Neckar were recognized for their proposal “Neuromorphics: Programmable Analog Computation Through Reconfigurable Digital Communication.” The work focuses on developing computer architectures that compute in a fashion inspired by how the brain computes—a field known as neuromorphics.
“The brain handles certain real-world tasks extremely well compared to traditional computer architectures,” said Neckar. “Understanding how the brain does this and leveraging this knowledge paves the way for a new class of computational devices.”
Analog silicon neurons that mimic the way biological neurons work are very energy efficient and the two fellowship winners have exploited this efficiency in a device that digitally networks such neurons to perform programmable computations. This device, developed at Stanford, is called Neurogrid.
Read the full story by Andrew Myers on the School of Engineering website.
