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Spiking Linear Dynamical Systems on Neuromorphic Hardware for Low-Power BMI (arxiv.org)
1 point by godelmachine on May 24, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They taught a chip of spiking neurons to run a Kalman filter, the standard way of smoothing noisy signals over time, and wrote math predicting how far its answers drift from a normal computer's. It decoded vocal pitch from brain activity using little power.

Abstract · Spiking Linear Dynamical Systems on Neuromorphic Hardware for Low-Power Brain-Machine Interfaces

Neuromorphic architectures achieve low-power operation by using many simple spiking neurons in lieu of traditional hardware. Here, we develop methods for precise linear computations in spiking neural networks and use these methods to map the evolution of a linear dynamical system (LDS) onto an existing neuromorphic chip: IBM's TrueNorth. We analytically characterize, and numerically validate, the discrepancy between the spiking LDS state sequence and that of its non-spiking counterpart. These analytical results shed light on the multiway tradeoff between time, space, energy, and accuracy in neuromorphic computation. To demonstrate the utility of our work, we implemented a neuromorphic Kalman filter (KF) and used it for offline decoding of human vocal pitch from neural data. The neuromorphic KF could be used for low-power filtering in domains beyond neuroscience, such as navigation or robotics.

David G. Clark, Jesse A. Livezey, Edward F. Chang, Kristofer E. Bouchard
arXiv:1805.08889 · cs.NE, q-bio.NC · submitted May 22, 2018 · updated Jun 5, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · 23 pages, 8 figures; added reference, removed typo in Fig. 2

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