NEAL Home Page

The Neuromorphic Embodied Agents that Learn project (NEAL) is part of the The Human Brain Project funded by the EU. This project builds on our earlier Cell Assembly Robot (CABot) work and extends it. NEAL will translate the java based fatiguing leaky integrate and fire neural model and system to PyNN, which in turn will be translated to the SpiNNaker and HICANN neuromorphic hardware. The CABot3 agent will run on these platforms in its virtual environment. It will then be extended to CABot4 with increased capabilities for learning and new cognitive models. Learning will include cell assemblies that represent visual object categories and that persist for psychologically realistic times, and improved learning of plans.

The project members include:

• Chris Huyck Principle Investigator
• Ian Mitchell Co-Investigator
• Carl Evans is helping with software engineering methods.
• Alberto Vergani is working on bump attractors.

Talks from the project include:

• It Is Simple to Program with Spiking Neurons
• NEAL Project Overview
• NEAL Progress Report, at the the virtual quarterly meeting in December 2019; notes for a 5 minute talk by Chris.
• Embodied Spatial Learning with NEST and SpiNNaker, at the EITN Neural SLAM workshop in March 2019 in Paris; notes for a 30 minute talk by Chris.
• NEAL Progress Report, at the quarterly meeting in March 2019 in Graz; notes for an 8 minute talk by Chris.
• Implementing Rules with Artificial Neurons, at the SGAI conference in Cambridge in December 2018 by Chris from work with Dainius Kreivenas.
• A Proto Neural Cognitive Architecture, at the AI seminar at Middlesex in October 2018 by Chris.
• Big Neural Networks and Neural Agents, at the London quarterly meeting in June 2017; notes for a 20 minute talk (followed by 15 minutes for questions) by Chris.
• NEAL Quarterly Update, at the London quarterly meeting in June 2017; notes for a 5 minute talk by Chris.
• NEAL: Milestones and Future Work, at the Dresden quarterly meeting in March 2017; notes for a 6 minute talk by Chris.
• PlaNeural: Spiking Neural Networks that Plan, Ian's BICA 2016 talk.
• FSAs and Agents, at the Heidelberg quarterly meeting in July 2016; notes for a 10 minute talk by Chris.
• NEAL and NEAL-2, at the Paris quarterly meeting in May 2016; notes for a 10 minute talk by Chris.
• Final NEAL SP9/11 talk, at the Brighton quarterly meeting in Oct 2015; notes for a 10 minute talk by Chris.
• Natural Language Processing with Neurons that I gave to the Sheffield NLP group in October 2015.
• The NEAL plan, the kickoff talk in Sabanaci in April 2014; notes for a 10 minute talk by Chris.
• NEAL: Neuromorphic Embodied Agents that Learn, a talk for the AI reading group before we submitted the proposal in October 2013.