Simeon Bamford

I'm a research associate with the Laboratory for Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems at Pomeu Fabra University in Barcelona. I'm currently seconded to the Modelling of Complex Systems group at l'Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome. I'm working on the EU-funded ReNaChip project.

I find both the study of neural systems and the discipline of engineering them fascinating. I work as a neuromorphic engineer; we create electronic circuits which mimic computation in animal's nervous systems. This is partly to help understand how brains work and partly to search for better ways of doing the kind of computing that nervous systems are good at, for example, sensing the environment and working out how to move around in it. The circuits we create are generally integrated on microchips, so they're manufactured in the same way as the processors in personal computers, but the design is very different, often using flows of electrical current to imitate the currents which flow through the nerve cells in our brains. One of the main applications may be to create prosthetic devices that interface directly with our nervous systems or even replace parts of them, for example to create robotic limbs for people who have lost them, which can be controlled just by thought, the same as real limbs can. The project I'm working on aims to create a chip which can be implanted in a brain to demonstrate that it can perform a simple learning task as well as the part of the brain it is replacing.

A chip I designed during my PhD (right), alongside a commercial chip (left)For my PhD at the University of Edinburgh I worked on an alternative method for delivering events within neuromorphic systems made of many silicon chips; the events represent spikes, the electrical pulses that brain cells use to communicate with each other. I also implemented the formation and elimination of connections between neurons (a process which happens continuously in our brains, known as "synaptic rewiring"). I then used synaptic rewiring to model the development of topographic maps (ordered sets of connections between different brain areas).

In my MSc I worked on a project testing an experimental device (a planar patch-clamp chip) for electrical recording from biological nerve cells; this project gave me experience with the patch-clamp technique as well as some silicon clean-room experience.

I also briefly worked at the University of Edinburgh as a research associate on a project to develop a chip specialised for neuromorphic applications, with reconfigurable blocks of analogue circuitry, in the style of a field-programmable gate array.

Academic CV

Peer-reviewed journal articles

Peer-reviewed conference papers

Theses and related publications

Conference abstracts - not peer reviewed

Talks

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