On Tuesday, May 29, BioSim Laboratory of the School of ECE, NTUA hosted a lecture by Professor Jose C. Principe titled "Time Based Computation with Pulse Trains".

On Tuesday, May 29, Jose C. Principe, Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of Florida, gave a lecture about “Time based computation with pulse trains”, at the Conference Hall of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens.

Numeric computation is at the core of man-made computation models and its mathematical foundations are very well understood. However, we humans very likely do not use the same principles. This talk described efforts to think out of the digital computation box and searched for alternate computational methodologies with pulse trains. After a brief introduction, the integrate-and-fire converter was described, as a means of converting analog signals into pulse trains, and two approaches for processing information in pulse trains were discussed, that can be implemented in ultra-low power digital hardware, preserving the asynchronous nature of the pulse domain representations. The first approach learns using machine learning the structure of the data in a training set and implements an approximation directly in finite state machines. The other approach, less developed, shows that it is possible to perform addition, multiplication and convolution with pulse trains without using binary representations, with an accuracy compatible with IoT applications.   Jose C. Principe (M’83-SM’90-F’00) is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida where he teaches advanced signal processing, machine learning and artificial neural networks (ANNs) modeling. He is BellSouth Professor and the Founder and Director of the University of Florida Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory (CNEL) www.cnel.ufl.edu. His primary area of interest is processing of time varying signals with adaptive neural models. The CNEL Lab has been studying signal and pattern recognition principles based on information theoretic criteria (entropy and mutual information). Dr. Principe is an IEEE Fellow. He was the past Chair of the Technical Committee on Neural Networks of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Past-President of the International Neural Network Society, and Past-Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.  Dr. Principe has more than 800 publications. He directed 98 Ph.D. dissertations and 65 Master theses. He wrote in 2000 an interactive electronic book entitled “Neural and Adaptive Systems” published by John Wiley and Sons and more recently co-authored several books on “Brain Machine Interface Engineering” Morgan and Claypool, “Information Theoretic Learning”, Springer, and “Kernel Adaptive Filtering”, Wiley.

After the lecture, a reception followed, where attendees had the opportunity to continue with fruitful discussions.

The event was organized by the Biomedical Simulations and Imaging (BioSim) Lab with the support of the IEEE Greece Section.