Neuromorphic Computing, a concept pioneered in the late 1980s, is receiving a lot of attention lately due to its promise of reducing the computational energy, latency, as well as learning complexity in artificial neural networks. Taking inspiration from neuroscience, this interdisciplinary field performs a multi-stack optimization across devices, circuits, and algorithms by providing an end-to-end approach to achieving brain-like efficiency in machine intelligence. On one side, neuromorphic computing introduces a new algorithmic paradigm, known as Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which is a significant shift from standard deep learning and transmits information as spikes (“1” or “0”) rather than analog values. This has opened up novel algorithmic research directions to formulate methods to represent data in spike-trains, develop neuron models that can process information over time, design learning algorithms for event-driven dynamical systems, and engineer network architectures amenable to sparse, asynchronous, event-driven computing to achieve lower power consumption. On the other side, a parallel research thrust focuses on development of efficient computing platforms for new algorithms. Standard accelerators that are amenable to deep learning workloads are not particularly suitable to handle processing across multiple timesteps efficiently. To that effect, researchers have designed neuromorphic hardware that rely on event-driven sparse computations as well as efficient matrix operations. While most large-scale neuromorphic systems have been explored based on CMOS technology, recently, Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) technologies show promise toward implementing bio-mimetic functionalities on single devices. In this article, we outline several strides that neuromorphic computing based on spiking neural networks (SNNs) has taken over the recent past, and we present our outlook on the challenges that this field needs to overcome to make the bio-plausibility route a successful one.

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Exploring Neuromorphic Computing Based on Spiking Neural Networks: Algorithms to Hardware

Spiking Neural Networks are known to be very effective for neuromorphic processor implementations, achieving orders of magnitude improvements in energy efficiency and computational latency over traditional deep learning approaches. Comparable algorithmic performance was recently made possible as well with the adaptation of supervised training algorithms to the context of spiking neural networks. However, information including audio, video, and other sensor-derived data are typically encoded as real-valued signals that are not well-suited to spiking neural networks, preventing the network from leveraging spike timing information. Efficient encoding from real-valued signals to spikes is therefore critical and significantly impacts the performance of the overall system. To efficiently encode signals into spikes, both the preservation of information relevant to the task at hand as well as the density of the encoded spikes must be considered. In this paper, we study four spike encoding methods in the context of a speaker independent digit classification system: Send on Delta, Time to First Spike, Leaky Integrate and Fire Neuron and Bens Spiker Algorithm. We first show that all encoding methods yield higher classification accuracy using significantly fewer spikes when encoding a bio-inspired cochleagram as opposed to a traditional short-time Fourier transform. We then show that two Send On Delta variants result in classification results comparable with a state of the art deep convolutional neural network baseline, while simultaneously reducing the encoded bit rate. Finally, we show that several encoding methods result in improved performance over the conventional deep learning baseline in certain cases, further demonstrating the power of spike encoding algorithms in the encoding of real-valued signals and that neuromorphic implementation has the potential to outperform state of the art techniques.

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Efficient Spike Encoding Algorithms for Neuromorphic Speech Recognition

—EMG (Electromyograph) signal based gesture recog- nition can prove vital for applications such as smart wear-ables and bio-medical neuro-prosthetic control. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising for low-power, real-time EMG gesture recognition, owing to their inherent spike/event driven spatio-temporal dynamics [1], [3]–[5]. In literature, there are limited demonstrations of neuromorphic hardware implementation (at full chip/board/system scale) for EMG gesture classiﬁcation. Moreover, most literature attempts exploit primitive SNNs based on LIF (Leaky Integrate & Fire) neurons. In this work, we address the aforementioned gaps with following key contribu- tions: (1) Low-power, high accuracy demonstration of EMG-signal based gesture recognition using neuromorphic Recurrent Spiking Neural Networks (RSNN). In particular, we propose a multi-time scale recurrent neuromorphic system based on special double-exponential adaptive threshold (DEXAT) [2] neurons. Our network achieves state-of-the-art classiﬁcation accuracy (90%) while using ∼ 53% lesser neurons than best reported prior art on Roshambo EMG dataset [5]. (2) A new multi- channel spike encoder scheme for efﬁcient processing of real-valued EMG data on neuromorphic systems. (3) Unique multi- compartment methodology to implement complex adaptive neurons on Intel’s dedicated neuromorphic Loihi chip is shown. (4) RSNN implementation on Loihi (Nahuku 32) achieves signiﬁcant energy/latency beneﬁts of ∼ 983X/19X compared to GPU for batch size = 50.

Low Power Neuromorphic EMG Gesture Classification

In this work, we show an efficient Electromyograph (EMG) gesture recognition using Double Exponential Adaptive Threshold (DEXAT) neuron based Recurrent Spiking Neural Network (RSNN). Our network achieves a classification accuracy of 90% while using lesser number of neurons compared to the best reported prior art on Roshambo EMG dataset. Further, to illustrate the benefits of dedicated neuromorphic hardware, we show hardware implementation of DEXAT neuron using multicompartment methodology on Intel's neuromorphic Loihi chip. RSNN implementation on Loihi (Nahuku 32) achieves significant energy/latency benefits of ~983X/19X compared to GPU for batch size = 50.

Neuromorphic Recurrent Spiking Neural Networks for EMG Gesture Classification and Low Power Implementation on Loihi

In recent years, the effectiveness of a spiking neural network (SNN) for Electromyography (EMG) pattern recognition has been validated, but there is a lack of comprehensive consideration of the problems of heavy training burden, poor robustness, and high energy consumption in the application of actual myoelectric control systems. In order to explore the feasibility of the application of SNN in actual myoelectric control systems, this paper investigated an EMG pattern recognition scheme based on SNN. To alleviate the differences in EMG distribution caused by electrode shifts and individual differences, the adaptive threshold encoding was applied to gesture sample encoding. To improve the feature extraction ability of SNN, the leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIF) neuron that combines voltage-current effect was adopted as a spike neuron model. To balance recognition accuracy and power consumption, experiments were designed to determine encoding parameter and LIF neuron release threshold. By conducting the gesture recognition experiments considering different training test ratios, electrode shifts, and user independences on the nine-gesture high-density and low-density EMG datasets respectively, the advantages of the proposed SNN-based scheme have been verified. Compared with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), SNN can effectively reduce the number of repetitions in the training set, and its power consumption was reduced by 1-2 orders of magnitude. For the high-density and low-density EMG datasets, SNN improved the overall average accuracies by about (0.99 ~ 14.91%) under different training test ratios. For the high-density EMG dataset, the accuracy of SNN was improved by (0.94 ~ 13.76%) under electrode-shift condition and (3.81 ~ 18.95%) in user-independent case. The advantages of SNN in alleviating the user training burden, reducing power consumption, and improving robustness are of great significance for the implementation of user-friendly low-power myoelectric control systems. 

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Feasibility study on the application of a spiking neural network in myoelectric control systems

Surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals result from muscle movement and hence they are an ideal candidate for benchmarking event-driven sensing and computing. We propose a simple yet novel approach for optimizing the spike encoding algorithm's hyper-parameters inspired by the readout layer concept in reservoir computing. Using a simple machine learning algorithm after spike encoding, we report performance higher than the state-of-the-art spiking neural networks on two open-source datasets for hand gesture recognition. The spike encoded data is processed through a spiking reservoir with a biologically inspired topology and neuron model. When trained with the unsupervised activity regulation CRITICAL algorithm to operate at the edge of chaos, the reservoir yields better performance than state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks. The reservoir performance with regulated activity was found to be 89.72% for the Roshambo EMG dataset and 70.6% for the EMG subset of sensor fusion dataset. Therefore, the biologically-inspired computing paradigm, which is known for being power efficient, also proves to have a great potential when compared with conventional AI algorithms.

Signals to Spikes for Neuromorphic Regulated Reservoir Computing and EMG Hand Gesture Recognition

Surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals result from muscle movement and hence they are an ideal candidate for benchmarking event-driven sensing and computing. We propose a simple yet novel approach for optimizing the spike encoding algorithm’s hyper-parameters inspired by the readout layer concept in reservoir computing. Using a simple machine learning algorithm after spike encoding, we report performance higher than the state-of-the-art spiking neural networks on two open-source datasets for hand gesture recognition. The spike encoded data is processed through a spiking reservoir with a biologically inspired topology and neuron model. When trained with the unsupervised activity regulation CRITICAL algorithm to operate at the edge of chaos, the reservoir yields better performance than state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks. The reservoir performance with regulated activity was found to be 89.72% for the Roshambo EMG dataset and 70.6% for the EMG subset of sensor fusion dataset. Therefore, the biologically-inspired computing paradigm, which is known for being power efficient, also proves to have a great potential when compared with conventional AI algorithms.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3477145.3477267

Alzheimers disease is a fatal progressive brain disorder that worsens with time. It is high time we have inexpensive and quick clinical diagnostic techniques for early detection and care. In previous studies, various Machine Learning techniques and Pre-trained Deep Learning models have been used in conjunction with the extraction of various acoustic and linguistic features. Our study focuses on three models for the classification task in the ADReSS (The Alzheimers Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech) 2021 Challenge. We use the well-balanced dataset provided by the ADReSS Challenge for training and validating our models. Model 1 uses various acoustic features from the eGeMAPs feature-set, Model 2 uses various linguistic features that we generated from auto-generated transcripts and Model 3 uses the auto-generated transcripts directly to extract features using a Pre-trained BERT and TF-IDF. These models are described in detail in the models section.

Nikhil Garg

Papers

Signals to Spikes for Neuromorphic Regulated Reservoir Computing and EMG Hand Gesture Recognition

Signals to Spikes for Neuromorphic Regulated Reservoir Computing and EMG Hand Gesture Recognition

Alzheimers Dementia Detection using Acoustic & Linguistic features and Pre-Trained BERT.