Work history

Starting around 2005 I have been working on event-based sensors and processing. See the Sensors Group pages and my publications page for more information. The early history of the dynamic vision sensor (DVS) is at the (archival) site siliconretina.ini.uzh.ch. For more recent developments, see inilabs.com.

I also have a YouTube channel with many videos of sensors and robots.

From 2003 to about 2006 I worked with diploma students on adaptive building intelligence.

From 2001-2002 I worked with Sam Zahnd on the development of a vision-chip-augmented occupancy detector in collaboration with a Swiss company (HTS) that makes PIR (passive infrared) occupancy detectors.

From 2000-2002 , I took a detour from aVLSI and concentrated nearly a lot of my time on development of the luminous tactile floor for the exhibit “Ada: Intelligent Space” that INI developed for the Swiss Expo.02. This floor acted as the skin of the space, and was the primary interaction medium for the visitors. The Ada exhibit finished with more than 550,000 visitors. It was great to work with Rodney Douglas and Adrian Whatley on the development of Ada's floor.

From 1999-2001 we (Shih-Chii Liu and other hardware group members) developed the Physiologist’s Friend Chip, a self-contained, user-friendly device that models retinal and cortical spiking neurons. This chip is useful as a model animal for physiologists, and for lecturers who wish to demonstrate cell responses. We've sold about 15 of these devices to physiology labs around the world.

During the period 1995-1998, while consulting in Silicon Valley at several companies; (Arithmos--bought by STMicro, Synaptics, National Semiconductor , and Foveon). I was mainly working on CMOS imager technology. At Synaptics, on a project that led to the formation of Foveon, I worked with Carver Mead on engineering of a new type of; ”pulsed-bipolar” imager, which, though it had some really interesting and unique properties, didn't meet the needs of the marketplace.

Besides my time in Mead’s lab at Caltech, I also spent a year in David Van Essen’s lab looking for Charlie Anderson's cortical “shifter” circuits in monkey visual physiology experiments. (We found some intriguing results, but nothing definitive.) Before that, I spent about a year working with Christof Koch on mapping the Marr-Poggio stereopsis algorithm onto a Hopfield network and getting it to show the hysteretic behavior observed in stereo fusion.