[Onwar-phd] FW: Friday 27 March 16.00 - 17.00 hrs, room A1.16, Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam; ABC & SILS Center for Neuroscience - Seminar By Dr. Mario Negrello

[Hubregtse, K. (Kim)]

FYI

[cid:image001.jpg at 01DCB77E.4626C320]

ANNOUNCEMENT
ABC & SILS-Center for Neuroscience Seminar

You are cordially invited to attend:

“What’s in a positronic brain? -
 What are the essential biological features
of future neuromorphic intelligence?

By Dr. Mario Negrello

Department of Neuroscience,
Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam

Host: Cyriel Pennartz
Date: Friday, March 27, 2026
Time: 16:00 – 17:00 hrs
Location: Room A1.16, Science Park 904
Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam

Abstract

Abstract:
Neuromorphic engineering is often justified pragmatically: faster computers, lower power, or better AI. In this talk I take a different starting point and ask: what features of real brains are non-negotiable if we want a system that is genuinely neuromorphic, not just softly “brain-inspired”?
I take a cognitive–neuroscientific perspective on intelligence as sense-making within a narrow cognitive Goldilocks zone: a slice of physics where time, space, and energy are processed in human-scale units and where cognition is emphatically not scale-invariant. I contrast this with the abstraction of universal Turing computation, in which the material substrate and many physical constraints are deliberately erased. This abstraction has been extraordinarily fruitful for AI, but it also obscures how biological tissue gives rise to specific boundary conditions, dynamics, and emergent information.
       I then revisit the “apples and oranges” comparison between brains, digital computers, and artificial neural networks, arguing that current neuromorphic platforms mostly re-implement spiking point neurons and fixed connectivity, while neglecting key biological phenomena. I highlight in particular ongoing activity-dependent plasticity, homeostasis, heterogeneous populations, and representational drift—features that make biological intelligence robust, adaptive, and history-dependent, yet are largely absent from today’s hardware and learning rules.
    Finally, I propose a short list of neuromorphic non-negotiables—such as ubiquitous multi-scale plasticity, population coding with drifting representations, and the explicit use of delays—as design targets for the next generation of neuromorphic systems, and discuss how these impact on our theories of cognition.

Bio:
Mario Negrello obtained a mechanical engineering degree in Brazil (1997), and after a period in the industry (1997-2004) obtained a Masters and a PhD degree (2009, summa cum laude) in Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. At the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin (Germany) for Intelligent Dynamics and Autonomous Systems, Mario researched artificial evolution of neural network controllers for autonomous robots (2007/09), including a period as a visiting researcher at the Aerospace Engineering dept. at Cornell University (with Hod Lipson). His first postdoc was in the Computational Neuroscience laboratory at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (with Erik De Schutter) studying large scale computational models of the cerebellum. Currently he is assistant professor in the department of neuroscience in the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, where he combines empirical research and computational models (dept. head Chris De Zeeuw). Mario has published in the fields of Neuroscience, Computational Neuroscience, Cognitive Robotics, Evolutionary Robotics, Neuroethology, as well as a monograph published by Springer US in the Cognitive and Neural Systems series entitled Invariants of Behavior (2012).

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://listserver.vu.nl/pipermail/onwar-phd/attachments/20260319/5f016e74/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 5901 bytes
Desc: image001.jpg
URL: <https://listserver.vu.nl/pipermail/onwar-phd/attachments/20260319/5f016e74/image001-0001.jpg>