Set in the scenic Rocky Mountain area of Telluride, Colorado, the Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The INI has been strongly involved in the organization of this workshop since the beginning. This year INI’s Shih-Chii Liu and Tobi Delbruck served in the organizing committee. Other INI participants include Danny Neil, Julien Martel, and Michael Pfeiffer.

This workshop has its roots in the disciplines of neuromorphic engineering and neuroscience, and now extends towards neuromorphic cognition. The workshop’s unique format consists of lectures and hands-on projects. The 2014 workshop was centered around 5 topic areas, covering human auditory cognition, mathematical frameworks for cognition and their embodiment in robots, to applications of neuromorphic vision in wearable computing, a topic area co-organized by Michael Pfeiffer. In addition, the workshop featured a one-week series of talks by leading experts in computational neuroscience, organized by Terry Sejnowksi.

The projects in the workshop demonstrated the rapid growth of the field. As part of the agenda for the 20th anniversary celebrations of the workshop, 3 organized panel discussions on the past, present, and future of neuromorphic engineering respectively, featured many of the central researchers who have shaped the field over the past 2 decades. One conclusion of the discussions was that the projects addressed by current generations of Telluride participants have become much more ambitious, and use increasingly mature theoretical, software, and hardware tools to challenge conventional computing. In addition, there is increasing interest in the field from researchers in other disciplines such as cognitive science and machine learning, and importantly also from industry.

For more information about this year's workshop, visit the main workshop site neuromorphs.net/nm/wiki/2014