Prof Leon Chua from the University of California at Berkeley and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University describes the concept of memristors from an information processing perspective of the brain, and discusses how it resolves some anomalies and paradox.
Free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come first-served basis.
This lecture shows that, from an information processing perspective, brains are made of memristors. Moreover it will resolve two mystifying anomalies of the Hodgkin-Huxley neuron. It will also identify the elusive nonlinear dynamical mechanism which gives rise to the brain's action potential to be the same as the heretofore unresolved mechanism which gives rise to Alan Turing's morphological phenomenon, and to Stephen Smale's reaction-diffusion paradox, namely, a sub-critical Hopf bifurcation originating from the "edge of chaos", a conceptual pearl extracted from the "principle of local activity."
About the speaker
Prof Leon Chua obtained his PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1964. He was Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at Purdue University from 1964 to 1970. He joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1971, where he is currently Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. He has been appointed as Chair Professor of Nonlinear Circuits and Complexity Theory in Electronic and Information Engineering at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University under the Distinguished Scholar Scheme.
Prof Chua's current research interests include cellular neural/nonlinear networks, nonlinear circuits and systems, nonlinear dynamics, bifurcation theory and chaos theory. Prof Chua is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and was the President of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, and founding editor and editor-in-chief of International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos. He was elected a Foreign Member of the European Academy of Sciences (Academia Europea) in 1997. In the electrical, electronic and computer engineering community, Prof Chua is widely dubbed as the “father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks”, and his Chua’s circuit family has now become standard textbook material in some electrical engineering curricula.
Prof Chua was the first recipient of the 2005 Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award, the highest IEEE Technical Field Award for outstanding contributions to the fundamentals of any aspect of electronic circuits and systems. He was also awarded the prestigious IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award in 2000 for his contributions in neural networks. He has received many international prizes, including the IEEE Browder J. Thompson Memorial Prize and the IEEE W. R. G. Baker Prize, the Frederick Emmons Award, and the Mac Van Valkenburg Award twice. Recently, he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010 and the TUM Distinguished Affiliated Professorship by Technische Universität München in Germany.
Prof Chua was awarded seven US patents and nine Honorary Doctorates from major European universities and Japan. He was a recipient of “the top 15 cited authors in engineering” award in 2002, chosen from the Current Contents (ISI) database of all cited papers in all branches of engineering disciplines in the citation index from 1991 to 31 October 2001.
Free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come first-served basis.
