News

Chang Gao receives the Mahowald Early Career Award for Neuromorphic Engineering

• Monday, 16 January 2023

The MECA jury has awarded the 2022 Mahowald Early Career Award to Chang Gao (Assistant Professor in ELCA) for the project "Accelerating Recurrent Neural Networks with Neuromorphic Principles." The project introduces efficient computing using the neuromorphic principles of spatial and temporal sparsity, leading to an energy-efficient accelerator for edge RNN computing. Gao's accomplishments have the potential to revolutionize applications in healthcare, wearables, and intelligent biomedical implants.

The Mahowald Early Career Award (MECA) recognizes an exceptionally talented student, as Misha Mahowald was. The Award is made for an innovative project that addresses a significant problem in neuromorphic engineering or related problems in neuroscience and neural computation. In their submission, candidates must make a convincing case for why their project fulfills this criterion.

Gao developed this work during his Ph.D. with the Sensors Group at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. He is now a tenure-track assistant professor at TU Delft, where he has started a lab entitled "Efficient circuits & systems for Machine Intelligence" (EMI). Gao's Google scholar profile provides links to his work.