[CapoCaccia - announce] Paolo Del Giudice

[Giacomo Indiveri]

Dear all, it is with great sadness that we have to announce that 
Paolo Del Giudice passed away last Tuesday 27 April, 2021.

Paolo started his scientific career as a collaborator of Miguel 
Virasoro, at the Dept. of Physics in Rome, University La 
Sapienza. As many of the pioneering physicists who decided to 
study neural networks in the 80’s, he used statistical mechanics 
to study learning and memory. When he was hired as a researcher at 
the ISS (Istituto Superiore di Sanita’, Italian NIH) he got 
interested in neural network applications in high energy physics 
and started to develop neural classifiers of particle traces. He 
immediately understood the importance of implementing these 
networks in a dedicated hardware, which would be fast enough to 
classify particle traces in real time. When Daniel Amit moved to 
Rome, Paolo teamed up with him to start a new research initiative 
within the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). The aim 
of the initiative called ANNETTHE (Artificial neural networks for 
High Energy physics), which involved also physicists working on 
particle colliders and experts in electronics, was to develop a 
new generation of hardware to classify in real time the 
interesting traces observed in experiments. This was the first 
neuromorphic hardware initiative at INFN, and one of the first 
projects in which neural networks were used in real world 
applications. During this time, Paolo organized a series of 
workshops in Elba that were instrumental for creating an 
international scientific community working on theoretical physics, 
biology, neuroscience and high energy physics. Many of the 
participants of these workshops are now the leading experts in 
theoretical neuroscience. In Rome, Paolo was coordinating the 
efforts of three laboratories located at ISS, University la 
Sapienza and University of Tor Vergata. This highly 
interdisciplinary project led to the creation of one of the very 
first neuromorphic systems which was able to learn attractors 
using online learning (LANN21). This work and many other that 
followed, were inspired by the theory developed by Paolo and 
colleagues.
Paolo was involved in several theoretical studies on the dynamics 
of spiking networks, and the numerous results he and his team 
achieved were the main inspiration for the construction of 
neuromorphic systems. In particular, one of the central research 
topics for Paolo was online learning, and how it can shape the 
nonlinear dynamics of biological neuron networks. Together with 
other colleagues he constructed a model of a biologically inspired 
spiking neural network with plastic synapses which could 
autonomously learn stable representations of external stimuli by 
accessing only local information: from a tabula rasa, such a 
network was able to dynamically generate a working memory state 
encoding sensory information from the environment. This 
theoretical concept, born in the Amit group, was eventually 
translated into neuromorphic systems within the framework of the 
EU research project that he was involved in from 2001 to 2005 and 
called  “Attend-to-learn and learn-to-attend with neuromorphic, 
analogue VLSI (ALAVLSI)''.
This collaborative effort was already addressing topics and 
research questions that are now broadly relevant in Artificial 
Intelligence and Neuroscience. Paolo also established a team of 
“neuromorphic engineers” which built a series of impressive 
neuromorphic spiking neural network chips, and inspired them with 
his deep understanding of attractor networks with physical 
constraints, such as the ones that are present in both electronic 
and biological neural processing systems. Those efforts led to 
automatic procedures for configuring and controlling such chips 
that are still extremely valuable today and that will be widely 
used by the whole neuromorphic community for many years to come.
Paolo contributed to establishing the neuromorphic computing 
community with visionary ideas and research efforts from the very 
early years, starting from the late 1990’s. By participating both 
in the Telluride Workshop on Neuromorphic Engineering, and 
regularly in the series of CapoCaccia Workshops for Neuromorphic 
Cognition, he inspired and educated a large number of young 
investigators, many of which are now working in either academic 
prestigious laboratories, or companies in Europe and around the 
world. His lectures and discussion sessions in these workshops 
will be deeply missed.

Thanks to his intelligence, erudition, and communication skills, 
Paolo was able to establish efficient bridges with many colleagues 
belonging to different disciplines from his own. This has led to 
important collaborations with experimentalists worldwide who have 
appreciated his intellectual honesty and vision. He was also an 
outstanding mentor to his students.

All of you willing to send a message and/or pictures celebrating 
Paolo friendship and his scientific contribution, please do so by 
sending an email to remembering_Paolo at iss.it. We will collect all 
the material into a book edited by the Italian NIH intended for 
his beloved wife and daughter.

Sincerely,

Stefano Ferraina, Stefano Fusi, Maurizio Mattia, Elisabetta 
Chicca, and Giacomo Indiveri