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Dr R. Stanley Williams gives a distinguished seminar on “New Materials, Devices, Physics and Brain-Inspired Architectures for Computing”

Aug 21, 2018
Dr R. Stanley Williams gives a seminar on “New Materials, Devices, Physics and Brain-Inspired Architectures for Computing” on August 21, 2018. 

Dr R. Stanley Williams was recently retired from his position as Senior Fellow and Senior Vice President at Hewlett Packard (HP) Labs in Palo Alto of California, USA. Prior to his engagement with HP, he was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Labs and a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at UCLA. His primary scientific research has been in the areas of solid-state chemistry and physics and their applications to technology for over 40 years.  This has taken him on a journey that began with surface science; expanded to electronic, photonic and ionic nanotechnologies; and now encompasses computation, chaos, complexity and neuroarchitectonics.

During the seminar, Dr Williams described several examples from his recent research to give an idea of promising research areas using new materials and emerging devices to build active neuromorphic circuits that do not contain transistors.  All of the examples involve emulation of some type of process that has come from studying the neurophysiology of the brain.  He further explained that at the most basic level are various types of artificial synapses, e.g. memristors, that provide nonvolatile storage of real numbers or weights.  The next level of devices are artificial neurons that are capable of signal amplification and transmission, as well as ‘integrate and fire’ operation to provide a form of threshold logic that can be used for computation as well as learning.  He also discussed that one of the biggest challenges faced by researchers is actually understanding what computations the brain performs – a synergistic interaction between engineers building and testing new types of nonlinear dynamical computing hardware with brain researchers studying the connectivity and signaling in biological systems has the potential of dramatically accelerating both fields.

(From left) Professor Christopher Chao, Dean of Engineering, presents a souvenir to Dr Williams.