My summers are a time to travel
I have traveled the world, hiking in the mountains of Patagonia, the Alps in Switzerland, the rugged terrain in New Zealand, and the cascading waterfalls in Iceland. But not this summer, which was focused on zooming across the world on the Internet.
Scientific meetings, large and small, have all gone virtual. They are a different experience from in-person meetings, with both downsides and upsides. Virtual meetings lack the personal exchanges that occur at in-person meetings, but I have come to appreciate their value in keeping up with research, somewhere between reading a paper and having a personal discussion.
At the beginning of June, I attended a virtual meeting of the Learning in Machines and Brains (LMB) program sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). This program was initiated seventeen years ago by Geoffrey Hinton, a good friend and collaborator, and was continued by Joshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, all recipients of a recent Turing Award for pioneering research on deep learning. LMB is a small group of a few dozen researchers at the top of their game, creating future capabilities for AI based on neural networks. Since 2012 when deep learning went public, computing power used by the largest AI applications has been doubling every 3.4 months, much faster than Moore’s law for VLSI chips, which doubles every eighteen months.
The Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Workshop is the longest workshop series sponsored by the NSF. It has been meeting annually in the mountain village of Telluride since 1994 when we founded it, bringing together fifty students and fifty faculty for three weeks to create a new technology based on bioinspired low-power analog VLSI chips. The attendees work together intensively, building robots and testing new chips. In July, the workshop was held virtually, including virtual joint projects. More