Keynote Announcement: Steve Furber

We’re extremely pleased to announce our second keynote speaker for YDS2016 will be Steve Furber from the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. Steve has made massive contributions to the fields of Computer Engineering and Computer Science. Some of his most well known contributions came in the early days of Acorn Computers, where he was central to aspects of the design and production of several pieces of computing history, including the BBC Micro and the ARM-32 Bit RISC Microprocessor.

Some of Steve’s more recent work includes research as part of the Human Brain Project. In this work, he has led the the development of SpiNNaker (a Spiking Neural Network Architecture). SpiNNaker is an effort in developing computational systems that more closely mimic the human brain than many earlier efforts. When complete, SpiNNaker will consist of around one million ARM processors, and is anticipated to be able to model approximately one percent of the brain’s capability.

To find out more about about his work, you can check out his recent publications here, or follow him on Twitter.