Sander Bohte receives NWO grants

The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO has granted a VENI subsidy to CWI researcher Sander Bohte. Bohte will use the grant, approved in March 2003, to further his research on spiking neural networks. These types of networks incorporate the latest insights in functional biological neurons. In theory they are much more powerful than traditional artificial neural networks. Bothe's work is aimed at using spiking neurons in large-scale networks that can learn to deal with symbolic structures like grammar in language or compact descriptions of objects in vision. Advances in this area will give greater insights into the way the brain works, as well as new tools for creating computational intelligence. Bohte's research is part of the program of the Evolutionary Systems and Applied Algorithms theme SEN4. Since April 2003 he is working for one year as a visiting scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, funded by the NWO TALENT program.