2021 Mahowald award for Dynamic Audio Sensor Silicon Cochlea

The independent Prize Jury have unanimously awarded the 2020 Misha Mahowald Prize to the team led by Prof. Shih-Chii Liu for their pioneering “Dynamic Audio Sensor (DAS)” that emulates processing principles found in the biological hearing sensors.

The DAS team members who contributed to this project are: Minhao Yang, Chang Gao, Enea Ceolini, Adrian Huber, Jithendar Anumula, Ilya Kiselev, Daniel Neil, and Shih-Chii Liu.

Read more about the DAS technology in Sunny Bain's "Allowing Machines to Listen, and Understand" on EE Times.

From the press release:

The 2020 Prize has been awarded to a team led by Prof. Shih-Chii Liu, at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, for their pioneering “Dynamic Audio Sensor” (DAS) that emulates processing principles found in the biological hearing sensors. Their achievements are in the areas of hybrid analog-digital circuit design, specifically the implementation of a neuromorphic spiking cochlea, the principle sensory structure of vertebrate nervous systems. This is the core element of their asynchronous audio signal processing system. The team has demonstrated the use of their DAS for real-world Internet of Things (IoT) tasks, and by integrating it with deep learning architectures.

“Even at the end of Moore’s law, digital computation will lag behind biology’s energy efficiency by at least a factor thousand. Thus, the potential efficiency of hybrid analog electronic systems such as DAS is becoming more important than ever.” (Quote: Shih-Chii Liu)