[CapoCaccia - announce] Winner of the 2019 Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering

[Maik Berchten]

The pioneering space imaging project Astrosite™ of The Western Sydney
University research team is the 2019 winner of the prestigious Misha
Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering.


Neuromorphic engineering is a field of electrical engineering that takes
inspiration from neural systems in biology to build brain-like technology.
The Misha Mahowald Prize – named for one of the most influential pioneers
of neuromorphic engineering, and valued at $10,000 – is awarded each year
to recognise outstanding research in the field.

The 2019 Prize has been awarded to Associate Professor Gregory Cohen,
Postdoctoral Research Fellow Saeed Afshar, Technical Officers Mr Colin
Symons and Mr Paras Karki, and Professor André van Schaik – from the
University’s International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems (ICNS) and MARCS
Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development.

The team has been recognised for the Astrosite™ – a mobile space
situational awareness (SSA) module based on event-based neuromorphic
sensors that was unveiled in February 2019 at the Australian Avalon
Airshow.  The neuromorphic sesnors offer a novel means of performing SSA
tasks and provide capabilities that cannot be achieved using conventional
astronomy cameras. These benefits include the abilities to operate during
daylight conditions, image under a wide range of lighting conditions, and
to perform continuous and frame-free sky imaging.

Lead researcher, Associate Professor Gregory Cohen, says the
ground-breaking Astrosite™ project has already proven game-changing in a
number of fields, including defence.

“With tens of thousands of man-made objects currently orbiting in space,
the risk of collision between debris, satellites and spacecraft has become
a serious concern for organisations with a commercial interest in space, as
well as national and international defence agencies,” says Associate
Professor Cohen.
“The Astrosite™ uses event-based sensors that are inspired by the human
eye, in which each pixel operates independently to detect only local
changes in light intensity, in contrast to standard cameras where all
pixels are captured at the same instant in time. This gives the event-based
sensors an unprecedented resolution in time and dynamic range of intensity.”

The Misha Mahowald Prize (mahowaldprize.org) is managed by iniForum GmbH,
 Switzerland, and decided by a jury of internationally recognised experts
Associate Professor Cohen will accept the Prize on behalf of the ICNS team
at a special awards ceremony as part of the 2020 CapoCaccia Workshop
Conference Toward Neuromorphic Intelligence in Sardinia, Italy.
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