Major releases improved Lava performance and enabled Loihi 2 features

Lava 0.8.0 (release notes) accelerated multi-chip network compilation by over 10x, added support for saving and loading compiled processes, introduced the Lava Peripherals package with support for Prophesee event cameras, and added Loihi 2 hardware features such as sparse connectivity, synaptic delays, and multiple inputs to µcode neurons.

Lava 0.9.0 (release notes) added continual learning prototypes (CLP) tutorials demonstrating 3-factor learning, added support for basic vector operations to enable VSA and normalization of a population of neurons, merged infrastructure to enable high-speed I/O to Loihi 2 chips, and fixed bugs in convolution, delay dense, and the install process.

Lava-DL 0.5.0 (release notes) added tiny YOLOv3 inference tutorial:

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Process graph architecture for tiny YOLOv3 model in Lava-DL

Team Clairaudience was awarded first prize in the Intel Neuromorphic DNS Challenge Track 1

Clairaudience claimed the top $15,000 prize for the Intel Neuromorphic Deep Noise Suppression (NDNS) Challenge. 19 models from 8 teams were evaluated for algorithmic innovation using an audio denoising dataset of human speech including English, German, French, Spanish, Russian and various categories of noise. The winning team’s submission improved audio quality by up to 8 dB using a novel Gated Spiking Unit neuron model, a sophisticated network architecture integrating both full-band and sub-band processing modules, and adversarial training techniques rarely applied so far in the neuromorphic field (winning presentation).

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Clairaudience’s FullSubNet architecture for audio denoising.

In the news: PCGamer featured Loihi 2 as a technology that could alter the gaming landscape

Intel Innovation 2023: Sally Ward-Foxton interviewed Mike Davies for EETimes, asked the question “What is holding back neuromorphic computing?”

NCL Director Mike Davies gave a keynote address at ASYNC ‘23

Recent Publications from the INRC

• Neuromorphic Recurrent Spiking Neural Networks for EMG Gesture Classification and Low Power Implementation on Loihi 

• Implementing and Benchmarking the Locally Competitive Algorithm on the Loihi 2 Neuromorphic Processor  

• Bio-realistic Neural Network Implementation on Loihi 2 with Izhikevich Neurons 

• Energy-Efficient On-Board Radio Resource Management for Satellite Communications via Neuromorphic Computing

• Neuromorphic Hardware in Outer Space: Software Defined Networking Executed on an In-Orbit Loihi Spiking Processor

• BrainStack: A Platform for Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Collaborative Experiments on a Nano-Satellite

• Evaluating Spiking Neural Network On Neuromorphic Platform For Human Activity Recognition