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Applied Brain Research -- Integrated AI Systems  
 
Founded: Jan 2014
Status: Private
Source: Semiconductor Times, 2/23
appliedbrainresearch.com
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada

Applied Brain Research (ABR) was spun out of Professor Chris Eliasmith’s Computational Neuroscience Research Group (CNRG) at the University of Waterloo in 2014, about two years after the Spaun model was published. Just before that, Peter Suma had joined the CNRG to see if their approach to building neural and cognitive models might have commercial applications. The company has roughly 15 employees.

The company’s goal is “to build the best integrated AI systems, ultimately resulting in devices that you can work with in the real world.” ABR has joined the Silicon Catalyst Incubator Program.

ABR recently unveiled its new Time Series AI processor (TSP), which uses 100x less-power, costs 10x less, and runs AI models that are up to 10x larger than the equivalent processor required for such workloads, according to the company. Decades of brain research by ABR’s scientists enabled the discovery of the ultra-efficient AI compression algorithm that powers the TSP.

ABR’s vision is to empower devices with intelligent, concept-level conversations and decision-making abilities using their family of TSPs. Under the ABR TSP family of chips, the Chat Chip enables a voice-enabled personal assistance in any device while the Signal Processing Chip allows for cloud-sized time-series signal processing AI on a chip.

The chips are support with a SW stack comprised of the NengoEdge ML Creator for training high accuracy, low power audio processing models in the cloud, Legendre Memory Units (LMUs), which provide greter efficiency and accuracy than LSTMs and Transformers, the Nengo Suite for building and simulating large-scale brain models, and more.

Dr. Chris Eliasmith, co-CEO (Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience (CTN) at the University of Waterloo and the Computational Neuroscience Research Group (CNRG). Co-inventor of the Neural Engineering Framework (NEF), the Neural Engineering Objects (Nengo) software environment, and the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA))

Peter Suma, co-CEO (Director on >16 technology company boards, a venture capitalist, a CEO and a technology company founder in the software and robotics sectors. Previously President, Co-Founder & Director then CEO at PharmaTrust and VP Investments at Growthworks Capital)

peter.suma@appliedbrainresearch.com




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