We’re excited to announce that our very first Machine Intelligence Garage meetup.

Focused on our Experimentation Space theme, this meetup will give you the chance to learn more about the two companies who are developing concepts for tomorrow’s machine learning hardware: LightON and SpiNNaker.

Location: Digital Catapult, 101 Euston Road, NW1 2RA

Agenda:

6pm - Registrations, drinks and pizza

6.30pm - Laurent Daudet, CTO and Cofounder at LightOn

7.15pm - Steve Furber - Project lead at SpiNNaker

8pm - More drinks and networking!

9pm - Close

More about the speakers at the event:

Steve Furber, Project SpiNNaker

Steve Furber CBE FRS FREng is an ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. After completing a BA in mathematics and a PhD in aerodynamics at the University of Cambridge, UK, he spent the 1980s at Acorn Computers, where he was a principal designer of the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor. Over 100 billion variants of the ARM processor have since been manufactured, powering much of the world's mobile and embedded computing. He moved to the ICL Chair at Manchester in 1990 where he leads research into asynchronous and low-power systems and, more recently, neural systems engineering, where the SpiNNaker project is delivering a computer incorporating a million ARM processors optimised for brain modelling applications.

About SpiNNaker:

The SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network Architecture) project has delivered a machine incorporating half-a-million ARM processor cores designed primarily for brain-modelling applications. However, it can also be used to explore how biological inspiration may advance the capabilities of artificial neural networks and machine learning in the future. For example, stochastic neural networks running on SpiNNaker have been shown to solve constraint satisfaction problems in a similar class to those that can be solved on quantum annealing machines.

SpiNNaker boards will be available for companies to experiment with as part of Machine Intelligence Garage Experimentation Space. Click here to register your interest for our upcoming SpiNNaker workshop.

Laurent Daudet, CTO and co-founder at LightOn

As CTO of LightOn, Laurent’s task is to manage cross-disciplinary R&D projects, involving machine learning, optics, signal processing, electronics, and software engineering. He is currently on leave from his position as Professor of Physics at Paris Diderot University, Paris. He is a graduate from Ecole Normale Supérieure and holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Marseille University. In parallel, he held various academic positions: Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France, Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, USA, Visiting Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, UK and Visiting Professor at the National Institute for Informatics in Tokyo, Japan. Laurent has been a consultant to various small and large companies, and is a co-inventor in several patents. He is also a Senior Member of the IEEE and has authored or co-authored nearly 200 scientific publications.

About LightOn

Created in 2016, LightOn is a spin-off from some of Paris’ best Physics laboratories (ENS and ESPCI). It has developed a new technology of light-based co-processors: the Optical Processing Unit (OPU) that enables faster processing, for larger data, with a smaller energy footprint. LightOn’s OPU technology addresses the ever increasing needs of computations for Machine Learning at scale. For more information, please visit their site at: http://LightOn.io and follow them on Twitter @lightOnIO or LinkedIn. Press contacts : contact@LightOn.io