Paper Accepted into IOPscience Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering

We are proud to announce that the article 'A neuromorphic model of olfactory processing and sparse coding in the Drosophila larva brain' was accepted into the IOPscience journal Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering. This newly created journal is a multidisciplinary, open access journal publishing cutting edge research on the design, development and application of artificial neural networks and systems from both a neuromorphic hardware and computational perspective.

The paper, written by Elisabettta Chicca together with colleagues from the UZH and ETH Zurich, Switzerland, from the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, Germany and from the University of Cologne, Germany shows the possibility of using a model inspired by the nervous systems of fruit fly larva to process olfactory information into sparsely-coded, energy efficient signals with strongly limited computational resources. The model was evaluated both in software simulation and on the DYNAP-SE neuromorphic processor, testing the effects of various sparsening mechanisms. While there were some slight differences between the software simulation and the neuromorphic implementation, both showed significant population and temporal sparseness with the sparsening mechanisms turned on, which resulted in considerably greater odor discriminability versus the dense case.