Title: Organic Electronic Materials for Neuromorphic Computing and Adaptive Biointerfaces
Abstract:
Neuromorphic computing could address the inherent limitations of conventional silicon technology in dedicated machine learning applications. However, delivering a compact and efficient parallel computing technology that is capable of embedding artificial neural networks in hardware remains a significant challenge.
Organic electronic materials have shown great potential to overcome these limitations. This talk describes state-of-the-art organic neuromorphic devices and provides an overview of the current challenges in the field and attempts to address them. I demonstrate a novel concept based on an organic electrochemical transistor and show how crucial challenges in the field such as stability, variability and linearity can be overcome.
Next to that, bioelectronics has made an enormous progress towards the development of materials and devices that are capable of sensing, monitoring and control of a biological environment. Nevertheless, fully autonomous bioelectronic applications demand not only the acquisition of biological signals, but also local low power data processing, storage and the extraction of specific features of merit. This can pave the way for novel architectures with bio-inspired features, offering potential applications ranging from brain-computer-interfaces and robotics to adaptive biointerfaces. I will highlight our recent efforts for hybrid bioelectronic neuromorphic devices.
Biography:
Yoeri van de Burgt obtained his PhD degree at Eindhoven University of Technology in 2014. He then worked at a high-tech startup in Switzerland, after which he moved to the US where he obtained a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. During his postdoc his research focused on organic neuromorphic materials and electrochemical transistors. At the end of 2016, van de Burgt returned to Eindhoven as an assistant professor where he currently leads the Neuromorphic Engineering group. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge (UK) and was recently awarded an ERC Starting Grant from the European Commission. In 2018 he was nominated for the New Scientist Talent Award.