Biomimetic computation

Associate Professor Stanley Heinze at the Department of Biology

https://portal.research.lu.se/en/persons/stanley-heinze

Stanley Heinze is an expert in the neurobiology of the insect brain with a focus on both the behavior of insects under various circumstances as well as the anatomical structure of the brain. He works closely with Anders Mikkelsen, a physicist at Synchrotron Radiation Physics, to develop new types of computational tools inspired by hundreds of millions of years of evolution in biology.

 Prof Anders Mikkelsen at the Division of Synchrotron Radiation, Dept Physics

https://portal.research.lu.se/en/persons/anders-mikkelsen

Towards rebuilding the insect brain - defining the essential pieces

Insects are amazing navigators and can solve navigational challenges in noisy environments with very little computational power and energy demands. These abilities are far beyond what state of the art robots can achieve. Can we exploit the solutions that have evolved in insects over the last 450 millions years to improve or replace current technology? Although comparably simple, the insect brain still contains between 100 000 and one million neurons, connected by hundreds of millions of synapses. We can assume that some of those neural circuits are more relevant to solving navigational challenges than others, but which circuits are key? What is the minimal number of neurons required to guide navigational decisions? To answer these questions, our research compares the neural circuits of many species of insects at synaptic resolution. We try to identify the conserved core circuits that are shared across all species, assuming that these central elements provide a relevant starting point for biologically inspired hardware.

A few papers that have been published on the topic so far:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.08.052

https://doi.org/10.1021/acsphotonics.0c01003

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2634-4386/acf684