This EAGER project fosters international collaboration in an area of emerging (nano) technology, the design of novel neuromorphic cellular computing architectures. Led by members of a group at the Notre Dame University, the joint work will engage partners at Arizona State University and three European institutions, the Technical University Munich in Germany, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Spain's Seville University. Each of the five locations currently has strong research activities on various aspects of the topic covered by the collaboration, e.g., hybrid computer architectures, emerging processing, and sensing and enabling integration technologies. All have a distinguished history of ongoing research with support from funding sources in their respective countries. Together, the researchers intend to lay the groundwork for a radically different approach to information processing that is based on brain-inspired spatial-temporal behavior in large-scale, cellular arrays of nanoelectronic processing elements. Specifically, their goal is to identify the computational building blocks for future computing systems. This collaboration will further enable the capacities of these geographically diverse groups to facilitate student exchanges, brainstorming sessions - both physical and virtual - and short exchange visits by junior researchers. Conferences, workshops, summer schools, virtual classrooms to leverage the complementary expertise of various participating centers will be organized, and dissemination of research results and educational products will be undertaken cooperatively by the group.
Thus, the broader impact of the project should be significant, especially for the participating U.S. students and junior researchers, first by gaining early career, high level technical experience abroad, some of which is not readily available in the U.S., and secondly, by exposing them to a team-focused research environment in differing disciplinary and cultural contexts. It is also noteworthy that this particular project enjoys the benefits of access to complementary expertise at highly visible research centers for societal impacts of (nano) technology, e.g., the NSF-funded Center for Nanotechnology in Society, at Arizona State University, and the Munich Center for Technology in Society, at the Carl von Linde Akademie in Munich. Such interaction is expected to greatly enhance the societal and educational value of the overall collaborative effort. This EAGER project is co-funded by the NSF's Office of International and Integrative Activities.
