2021 BRN Discussion, page-20058

Hi Pauly56,

Not what you are looking for but Jeff Krichmar did a podcast back in 2019. He doesn't mention BRN by name but no doubt who he is referring to.

Under the microscope with Dr Jeff Krichmar

"Tom: Yeah. So when you’re, you’re modeling these minds, obviously as you’ve just mentioned, there’s a lot of computing power that goes into that. Are you find, obviously there must be some heat generation with the such a powerful processing. Do you find you’re limited in how much you can model?

Jeffrey: Yeah that’s a very good point. Um, there is, there’s a limit. It’s the heat, but even more so the energy consumption. So your robots are on batteries if their autonomous. So having on the onboard computation and limits your time that you can do this. I’ve worked on a couple projects, uh, in a field called neuromorphic engineering and they’re making hardware that mimics the brain. It’s very parallel. It’s event driven. Uh, it uses a representation like the brain does, uh, neurons that spike. Uh, and that leads to a very efficient, um, both in memory ending and energy consumption, a way of representing information. And so those things operate on low power and they’re, they’re just coming of age. Uh, we’ve done a couple of experiments putting them on one of our robots. Um, and you know, a small hobby grade battery can control the whole neural network operating the robot, uh, and, and also power the robot itself.

Jeffrey: So that’s a huge, huge, right. I think for especially, you know, the edge computing and the in the embedded system computing. Um, as you know, more AI applications go, you know, away from power sources. I think that’s a huge thing and that’s a good point you bring out. These models when we run them on a GPU suck up a lot of power and a, and a lot of heat. And usually if you’re, if we’re doing a large scale neural network on a server, um, you have all these fans running and in dedicate your conditioning. We can’t do that if you’re going to be a robot out in the field"somewhere."

Nicholas Oros also gets a mention.