[2021] Ioannis Pisokas, PhD student at the School of Informatics, has received a Saltire Early Career Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE). Image The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) has announced £1,805,000 in grants, funded by the Scottish Government, through the RSE Saltire Research Awards. The fellowship will fund Ioannis Pisokas for a 6 months research visit at the lab of Giacomo Indiveri at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI) in Zurich (affiliated with ETH and University of Zurich). The experience will benefit work towards his project on neuromorphic hardware design with local memory for controlling robots. During this project, Ioannis will design a new neuromorphic microprocessor that uses memristors to store data. In conventional microprocessors, the memory is located outside the processor cores and data need to be transferred between them. Memristors are a new technology Ioannis will utilise to colocate processing and memory in order to avoid the data transfer bottleneck and reduce the associated energy consumption that plagues conventional microprocessors. The expected gains in performance and energy efficiency are significant, opening the way to ecologically friendly computing. I am delighted and grateful to the Royal Society of Edinburgh for this award. This Fellowship presents me with an exciting and unique opportunity to incorporate the lessons I have learned while studying insect brains to the design of a next-generation microprocessor. RSE's dedication to supporting multidisciplinary research makes projects such as this possible. I am excited to join the lab of Giacomo Indiveri at INI. Ioannis PisokasUniversity of Edinburgh The purpose of the RSE saltire early career Fellowships is to provide PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and Early Career Researchers with an opportunity to focus on a research project of their choice in a university or research institute in another country, thereby supporting career development and high-quality research production through European connections and collaboration via inbound/outbound research placements. Ioannis Pisokas is one of 19 PhD students to receive an RSE Saltire Early Career Fellowship, alongside Marielle Péré from the University of Edinburgh. Related links The RSE invests £1.8m in the future of research – RSE Press Release Ioannis Pisokas' personal page This article was published on 2024-03-18
