From von Neumann Architecture and Atanasoffs ABC to Neuro-Morphic Computation and Kasabov’s NeuCube: Principles and Implementations

During the 1940s John Atanasoff with the help of one of his students Clifford E. Berry, at 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 structure. This chapter first reviews the principles of the earlier published work by the team on neuromorphic computational architecture NeuCube. NeuCube is not a general purpose machine but is still the first neuromorphic spatio/spectro-temporal data machine for learning, pattern recognition and understanding of spatio/spectro-temporal data. The chapter further presents the software/hardware implementation of the NeuCube as a development system for efficient applications on temporal or spatio/spectro-temporal across domain areas, including: brain data (EEG, fMRI), brain computer interfaces, robot control, multi-sensory data modelling, seismic stream data modelling and earthquake prediction, financial time series forecasting, climate data modelling and personalised, on-line risk of stroke prediction, and others. A limited version of the NeuCube software implementation is available from http://www.kedri.aut.ac.nz/neucube/.