It has been almost a month since we came back from Sardinia, Italy, where the CapoCaccia Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop took place. I felt somewhere in between nostalgic and sad that it was over, and it took me some days to get used to the old routine without the sea, the sun and the approximately 130 amazing workshop participants.
How it all started
The conference runs every year since 2007, but this year was the first time that I had the opportunity to attend.
With a biomedical
background I must confess the name of the conference was equally imposing, as
it is for you -reader without any background- in “Neuromorphic Engineering”-.
FYI neuromorphic engineering aims at developing new computing principles and
technologies based on neurobiological architectures. Examples are silicon
retinas, cochleas and neurons that mimic the ones that you have in your nervous
system.
I started hearing about
this workshop when I was an MSc student and it was hard to picture the
conference and the place. Just from listening to what people said I felt like
there was a clear analogy between the TV series LOST and Capo Caccia. The title
of the TV series perfectly described my initial feelings! Moreover, both TV
show and meeting take place in a hidden island where scientists are working on
“mysterious” topics not unlike the Dharma Initiative in the show. I had also
heard that both are isolated and far from civilization. My first suspicions
were confirmed, as indeed the hotel was nowhere near the city center.
The conference started and
I seriously did not know what to expect but it was definitely not conventional
from the beginning. What first caught my attention was the setup of the
conference room; the chairs were all close to one another in a half moon shape
bringing everyone in close proximity. After the introduction the first speaker
started drawing on a flip-chart, yes… on paper, no power point presentations,
they were completely prohibited. As the presenters need to draw, they have to
go step by step with their explanations right from the beginning and even if
you are not working on the same field you can more easily follow. The dynamics
of the presentation allowed breaking the wall between the presenter and the
rest of the participants where discussions and questions were a constant. It
was definitely not a one-man show. If you have attended any other, more
conventional scientific meetings you know exactly what I am talking about.
Also the workshop offered a
smooth transition within the two weeks from biology to neuromorphic engineering
going through different topics and different high- quality presenters with
different points of view. This is the only way to follow a story from different
angles. Some of the topics discussed were cortex, learning, winner-take-all
networks, neuromorphic devices, chips, robots, SpiNNaker, NEF, etc.
Another non-conventional
aspect of the meeting is that although it has a time structure, there is
flexibility in the sense of the topics to be addressed. Depending on the clear
interests that are being shown during the first days, the subjects, discussions
and meetings change.
The conference had also a
cool disco not really for dancing, well occasionally… but for setting up all
the different robots and computers. Most of the demos took place here:
Not everything is about
learning from someone else’s presentation but instead we could choose from a
list of projects where mostly PhD students were leading the group. You could
choose any group you liked and the point was to keep you busy during the
afternoons with the purpose of learning something new in a similar or
completely different topic as your own. You can read more about the projects
here: https://capocaccia.ethz.ch/capo/wiki/2013/Workgroups
Definitely for me the
coolest was that you could have breakfast with a neuroscientist, coffee with an
engineer and dinner with a theoretician and multiple combinations of the above
along the day. In a scientific environment this could not be better. This is
actually possible because all participants were staying at the same place, the
hotel is not huge and the fact that it is not so simple to escape get
out of the hotel account for a very natural interaction that would otherwise be
impossible in other conditions.
Why would you like to go there?
Science and technology
advance at huge steps nowadays and it is not longer possible to make progress
by just considering our own field. The only way to advance is by combining
different subjects. So if you are a biological neuroscientist you can go there
to learn what people are doing in engineering with the information you and people
in your field have been providing and if you are an engineering you should go
to see in which topics you can apply your technologies.
In conclusion Capo Caccia
is a two-week workshop where theoretical and experimental neuroscientists (and
physicists, engineers, mathematicians, psychologists, etc.) from around the
world meet to discuss, learn and work on different topics related to
neuromorphic engineering.
If you want to read more
about the conference go to: http://capocaccia.ethz.ch/
Here a couple of pictures
so you can get an idea:
And yes, we had a very nice
time.
