Lecturer: Herbert Jaeger
Fields: all IK disciplines and some more
Content
In this talk I want to explain my love affair with a scientific field that has no name – yet. Or rather, it has too many names. The current most popular branding is ‘neuromorphic computing’. However, when you hear ‘natural computing’, ‘in-materio-computing’, ‘physical computing’, ‘unconventional computing’, ‘non-digital computing’, ‘fluent computing’ (I have a list of twenty more), it might mean the same thing – or something else. The idea behind all of this is to engineer novel kinds of microchips to get novel kinds of ‘computing’ directly out of nanoscale physics, just like real brains pull their cognition magic from neuronal biophysics, without the detour of digital simulation of neural dynamics. Current big-scale funding for this sort of research thrives on the hope to replace Gigawatt AI server farms with artificial microbrains that burn only 20 Watts, like our brains. And as a bonus, to get implantable neuro-implants that need no batteries, or principally un-hackable computing machines, or robustly self-adapting edge computing. Super fascinating. Alas, nobody seems to have a clue how to do it – yet.
Literature
- H. Jaeger, B. Noheda, W.G. van der Wiel (2023): Toward a formal theory for computing machines made out of whatever physics offers. Nature Communications 14, 4911 (or the long version, 70 pages: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15408)
Lecturer
Herbert Jaeger studied mathematics and psychology in Freiburg (Germany), got his PhD in Computer Science / AI in Bielefeld (Germany) and then did a postdoc fellowship at the (then) German National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (GMD) in Sankt Augustin (Germany), where he subsequently founded the research unit on modeling intelligent dynamical sytsems (MINDS); then from 2001 to 2019 he served as professor of Computing Science at Jacobs University Bremen (Germany). Since 2019 he has been Professor for Computing in Cognitive Materials at the University of Groningen. Current research focus: mathematical foundations for computing in non-digital physical substrates. Jaeger retired 2025 and now has almost enough time for thinking. With only one exception (stupid flu), he attended all IKs, and served on various functions for the IK community since the beginning in 1997.
Affiliation: University of Groningen
Homepage: https://www.ai.rug.nl/minds/