A few years ago, Simon Thorpe won a research grant worth, with a budget of €2,499,480 (
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/108271/factsheet/en), for his M4 Project "
Memory
Mechanisms in
Man and
Machine" (
http://m4.ups-tlse.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/PROJET-M4-Scientific-proposal-bis-short.pdf) found at this website (
http://m4.ups-tlse.fr/).
The European Research Council (ERC) is awarding €680 million to 302 senior research leaders in 24 different countries across Europe in the latest competition for its prestigious ’Advanced Grants’. The funding allows these scientists to pursue their most ground-breaking ideas at the frontiers of knowledge together with their own teams.
Simon J. THORPE is one of the selected researchers with "Memory Mechanisms in Man and Machine":
CNRS press releasehttp://cerco.ups-tlse.fr/M4-project-Memory-mechanisms-in?lang=fr
The project aims to validate a set of 10 provocative claims:
(1) Humans can recognise visual and auditory stimuli that they have not experienced fordecades.
(2) Recognition after very long delays is possible without ever reactivating the memorytrace in the intervening period.
(3) These very long term memories require an initial memorisation phase, during whichmemory strength increases roughly linearly with the number of presentations.
(4) A few tens of presentations can be enough to form a memory that can last a lifetime.
(5) Attention‐related oscillatory brain activity can help store memories efficiently andrapidly.
(6) Storing such very long‐term memories involves the creation of highly selective"Grandmother Cells" that only fire if the original training stimulus is experienced again.
(7) The neocortex contains large numbers of totally silent cells ("Neocortical Dark Matter")that constitute the long‐term memory store.
(8) Grandmother Cells can be produced using simple spiking neural network models withSpike‐Time Dependent Plasticity (STDP) and competitive inhibitory lateral connections.
(9) This selectivity only requires binary synaptic weights that are either "on" or "off", greatlysimplifying the problem of maintaining the memory over long periods.
(10) Artificial systems using memristor‐like devices can implement the same principles,allowing the development of powerful new processing architectures that could replaceconventional computing hardware.
With the duration of the grant being from 2013 to 2018 (http://tmbi.fr/erc-advanced-grant-m4-memory-mechanisms-in-man-machine/ & https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/108271/factsheet/en), I'd assume that Simon Thorpe will publish his findings soon?
Oh wait, he's already made a presentation concerning his findings:
https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/events/docs/Simon_Thorpe-Memory-Mechanisms-Man-machine.pdf
Simon Thorpe made an interesting alteration to Claim (4):
"4. A few tens of presentations can be enough to form a memory that can last a lifetime"
Notably, Claim (10) no longer requires "using memristor-like devices":
"10. Artificial systems using memristor-like devices can implement the same principles, allowing the development of powerful new processing architectures that could replace conventional computing hardware"
And, you can see from above, the presentation shows the JAST patents.
Of which, BrainChip has an exclusive license to:
And then there's Akida, which may have contributed to the Claim alterations:
(20min delay)