Bioelectronics
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Date: 03-26-2010
Start Time:
2:00pm
End Time: 3:00pm
Speaker: Dr. Rahul Sarpeshkar
From:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Location: 414 CESPR/Schapiro
Nature is a great analog
and digital circuit designer. She has innovated circuits in the
biochemical, biomechanical, and bioelectronic domains that operate very
robustly with highly imprecise parts and with incredibly low levels of
power. I will discuss how analog and bio-inspired circuits and
architectures have led to and are leading to novel architectures in
sensing and computing, e.g., in ear-inspired radios, architectures for
improving operation in noise, neuron-inspired signal-to-symbol
conversion, and hybrid analog-digital architectures that are inspired
by computations within cells. Such techniques can lead to highly
energy-efficient parallel architectures that operate rapidly and
precisely and solve computationally intensive tasks. I will provide
examples from systems built in my lab for bionic ear processors for the
deaf, brain-machine interfaces for the blind and paralyzed, and body
sensor networks for cardiac monitoring.
Speaker Biography
Rahul Sarpeshkar
obtained Bachelor's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics at
MIT. After completing his PhD at Caltech, he joined Bell Labs as a
member of the technical staff. Since 1999, he has been on the faculty
of MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, where
he is an Associate Professor and heads a research group on Analog VLSI
and Biological Systems. He has received the Packard Fellow Award given
to outstanding faculty, the ONR Young Investigator Award, the NSF
Career Award, the Indus Technovator award, and the Junior Bose Award
for excellence in teaching at MIT. He holds over 25 patents and has
authored more than 100 publications, including one that was featured on
the cover of Nature. His research interests include analog
microelectronics, ultra-low-power circuits and systems, biologically
inspired circuits and systems, biomedical systems, feedback systems,
neuroscience, and molecular biology. His book, "Ultra Low Power
Bioelectronics: Fundamentals, Biomedical Applications, and Bio-inspired
Systems" was released in February 2010 and contains a broad and deep
treatment of the fields of bioelectronics and ultra low power
electronics.