From von neumann, John Atanasoff and ABC to Neuromorphic computation and the NeuCube spatio-temporal data machine

During the 1940s John Atanasoff with the help of one of his students Clifford E. Berry, in Iowa State College, created the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer) that was the first electronic digital computer. The ABC computer was not a general-purpose one, but still, it was the first to implement three of the most important ideas used in computers nowadays: binary data representation; using electronics instead of mechanical switches and wheels; using a Von Neumann architecture, where the memory and the computations are separated. A new computational paradigm, named as Neuromorphic, utilises the above two principles, but instead of the Von Neumann principle, it integrates the memory and the computation in a single module a spiking neural network (SNN) structure. The paper first reviews the need for neuromorphic systems and describes the principle differences from the traditional von Neumann architecture and then presents the NeuCube neuromorphic evolving spatio-temporal data machine for learning, recognising and understanding of spatio and spectro-temporal data using neuromorphic principles. This is the one of its kind artificial intelligence system that can be directly ported on the neuromorphic hardware chips. A limited version of the NeuCube software implementation is available from http://www.kedri.aut.ac.nz/neucube/