Rod Rinkus

Rod Rinkus joined Purdue ECE’s Center for Brain-Inspired Computing (C-BRIC) in May 2019 as a Lead Research Scholar. He is continuing his lifelong pursuit to understand the “neural code”, i.e., how information is represented and processed in the brain—how memories are formed so quickly, last so long, and can be retrieved so reliably and rapidly (seemingly without serial search)—with the goal of working with other C-BRIC members to create novel, low-power hardware realizations leveraging the brain’s principles and algorithms. After receiving his Ph.D. in Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University in 1996, he developed AI / Machine Learning systems at several Boston-area research firms. He returned to academics in 2004 as Postdoc in computational neuroscience with Prof. John Lisman at Brandeis, revitalizing his thesis work on a sparse distributed representation (SDR) based neural model of memory and cognition. This eventually led to founding Neurithmic Systems in 2010, which was supported by ONR, DARPA, and commercial contracts, to further develop his SDR-based neuromorphic model, now called Sparsey, for application to spatiotemporal problems, e.g., recognition of events in video. Sparsey’s very simple elements, i.e., binary units, weights, signals, and algorithms for learning and retrieval (inference), make it highly amenable to Non-von Neumann, processor-inmemory, hardware realizations, and closely aligned with C-BRIC’s mission.