Simon Thorpe

I studied Physiology and Psychology at Oxford where I obtained my doctorate with Edmund Rolls in 1981. After a year as a postdoc in Canada, I moved to Paris where I was recruited by the CNRS in 1983. In 1993, I was one of the founding members of the Brain and Cognition Research Center (CerCo) in Toulouse, and was its director from 2014-20. Much of my work has centered on understanding the phenomenal processing speed achieved by the human visual system. With the support of the CNRS, I created SpikeNet Technology in 1999, a startup that developed bio-inspired image processing technology. The company was acquired by BrainChip Inc in 2016. I am also one of the inventors of JAST, an unsupervised learning algorithm that allows neurons with binary synapses to learn to recognise spike patterns that repeat with very few repetitions. More recently, my interests have focused on how the brain stores sensory memories that can last for decades, despite the unreliability of biological hardware.