Direct Mind-Machine Teaming (Keynote)

Direct mind-machine teaming will help us treat brain disorders, augment the healthy brain, and shed light on how the brain as an organ gives rise to the mind. Delivering on this promise requires the design of computer systems that delicately balance the tight power, latency, and bandwidth trade-offs needed to decode brain activity, stimulate biological neurons, and control assistive devices most effectively.

This talk presents my group’s design of a standardized and general computer architecture for future brain interfacing. Our design enables the treatment of several neurological disorders (most notably, epilepsy and movement disorders) and lays the groundwork for brain interfacing techniques that can help augment cognitive control and decision-making in the healthy brain. Central to our design is end-to-end hardware acceleration, from the microarchitectural to the distributed system level. Key insights are undergirded via detailed physical synthesis models and chip tape-outs in a 12nm CMOS process.