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I'm a Ph.D. student at the Institute for Neuroinformatics INI, of the Zurich's politechnic (ETHZ). My research interests are oriented toward the study of biologically plausible perceptive systems.

In particular I design and test neuromorphic aVLSI circuits for implementing models of selective attention. The aim of this line of research is to exploit the subthreshold behaviour of CMOS transistors to map biophysical neuronal properties onto silicon; networks of such silicon synapses and neurons are used to test models of higher cognitive functions.

I'm currently collaborating to the EU founded project ALAVLSI "attend-to-learn and learn-to-attend, with neuromorphic analog VLSI"; the aim of this project is to implement a complete perceptive system, that takes advantage of the interplay between attention and learning, observed in biological systems.

Within this project I simulated (matlab, C) a recurrent neural network with Winner-Takes-All behaviour to estabilish its computational properties with respect to the variation of its parameters, then I prototyped and tested a neuromorphic chip with a bidimensional (32x32) hysteretic Winner-Takes-All network, with Inhibition of Return. The Selective Attention Chip can communicate with PCs and with other neuromorpihc chips, as for example silicon retinas, using spikes (Address Event Representation protocol). It can receive as input a "saliency map", generating an output scanpath that reproduces the movement of the focus of attention.