Brains and Machines
Curious to explore the technology advancing Artificial Intelligence beyond the usual headlines? Brains and Machines will introduce you to the people and ideas behind neuromorphic engineering, bio-inspired robotics, and other transformative technologies shaping AI’s future. From spiking neural networks and event-cameras to models of attention and mechanisms for prosthetic control, we investigate how machine cognition is moving forward.
Join Dr Sunny Bains, a scientist, journalist, and lecturer at University College London, as she talks to researchers, engineers, and computer scientists from across the field. With co-host, Dr Giulia D’Angelo from the Czech Technical University in Prague, and commentator Prof Ralph Etienne-Cummings from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the post-interview discussion provides context and insight into the featured innovations.
Produced in conjunction with Electronic Engineering Times. Check out the EETimes Current podcast for more.
Dr D’Angelo gratefully acknowledges the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship.
- Update frequency
- every 20 days
- Average duration
- 46 minutes
- Episodes
- 29
- Years Active
- 2023 - 2025
Event-Driven E-Skins Protect Both Robots and Humans
Professor Gordon Cheng builds humanoid robots that can feel their environment using artificial skin. In this episode of Brains and Machines, he talks to Dr. Sunny Bains of University College London a…
Digital Prototypes May Enable Analog Neuromorphic Chips
Dr. Charlotte Frenkel from the Technical University of Delft set records with a low-power neuromorphic chip she designed as part of her Ph.D. In this episode of Brains and Machines, she talks to Dr. …
IBM Used Mathematics as Compass on Journey to NorthPole
Dharmendra Modha’s TrueNorth chip added the word neuromorphic to the technorati lexicon back in 2014. In this episode of Brains and Machines, he talks to Dr. Sunny Bains of University College London …
Rippling Signals May Provide Working Memory in the Brain
For 50 years Dr. Terry Sejnowski has modelled the brain and used his insights to help inform AI. In this episode of Brains and Machines, he talks to Dr. Sunny Bains of the University College London a…
Making Analog Chip Designs Without Analog Designers
Dr. Jennifer Hasler of Georgia Tech is best known for her work with field programmable analog arrays (FPAAs). In this episode of Brains and Machines, she talks about the importance of, and progress i…
BrainChip’s IP for Targeting AI Applications at the Edge
Tony Lewis, CTO for BrainChip, and four other key scientists talk to Sunny Bains of the University College London. They discuss their business strategy, their temporal event-based neural network (TEN…
Robots Need Physical, Not Just Artificial, Intelligence
In this episode of Brains and Machines, emeritus Professor Rodney Brooks of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, currently CTO of Robust AI, talks about bottom-up and top-down approaches to robotic…
Embracing the Efficiency of the Neuromorphic Hairball
In this new episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Katie Schuman of the University of Tennessee explains the advantages of evolutionary approaches in neural processing to Dr. Sunny Bains of University …
Chip Combines Analog and Digital Neurons for Sensor Data
In this episode of Brains and Machines, UCL’s Sunny Bains talks to four key figures at Innatera, a spin out from the University of Delft in the Netherlands: Dr Petrut Bogdan, Neuromorphic Architect; …
Carver Mead Says Neuromorphic Efficiency Can Help AI
In this episode of Brains and Machines, UCL’s Sunny Bains talks parallelism, neural net efficiency and risk taking with Caltech’s Prof. Carver Mead. Now an emeritus professor, Mead has been instrumen…
Next-Gen Neuromorphic Researchers Look to Future
In this special episode of the Brains and Machines podcast, Dr. Sunny Bains and Dr. Giulia D’Angelo talk to four early career researchers: Dr. Kenneth Stewart, a computer scientist at the U.S. Naval …
SynSense Research Head Talks Combined Sensing, Processing
In this episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Sunny Bains talks to Dr. Dylan Muir, the head of research at SynSense. They discuss the company’s products, including Speck, Xylo, and Rockpool, some of th…
Half-Human–Scale SpiNNaker 2 Machine on Cloud in 2024
In this episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Sunny Bains talks with Professor Christian Mayr from the Technical University of Dresden, who worked on SpiNNaker with Steve Furber for many years. He is t…
Bio-Inspired Networks to Interface With Nervous System
In this episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Elisa Donati of the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich talks to Dr. Sunny Bains about neuromorphic circuits for prosthetics, drug delivery, and more. …
Choosing the Right Technologies for Hybrid AI Chips
In this episode of Brains and Machines, Dr. Sunny Bains discusses neuromorphic chips with Dr. Amirreza Yousefzadeh, who most recently worked at imec and the University of Twente. He has a broad backg…
Why Sound Processing Takes Time, Not Just Frequency
In this episode of Brains and Machines, Professor Shih-Chii Liu, co-director of the Sensors Group at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI)—part of both the ETH and the University of Zurich, Switzer…
Algorithms Help Spiking Neural Networks Learn to Learn
In this episode of Brains and Machines, Professor Emre Neftci, director of the Neuromorphic Software Ecosystems group at the Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI), talks to Brains and Machines host, Dr. Sun…
Giving the Humanoid iCub Embodied, Neuromorphic Vision
Dr. Chiara Bartolozzi, head of the event-driven perception for the robotics group at the Italian Institute for Technology (IIT) in Genoa, develops analog sub-threshold circuits to make bio-inspired b…
Tobi Delbrück Talks Caltech, Cameras, and Neural Control
In this episode of the Brains and Machines podcast, Sunny Bains talks to Dr. Tobi Delbrück, one of the original neuromorphic engineers from Carver Mead’s team at Caltech. Now a professor at the Insti…
Ferroelectric Memristors and Exotic Materials to Drive AI
In this episode of Brains and Machines, Sunny Bains gets deep into nanoscale ferroelectrics with Professor Beatriz Noheda, director of the Groningen Cognitive Systems and Materials Center (CogniGron)…