For those interested, I highly recommend looking at the slides and recorded presentations form the Neuromorphic-Inspired Computational Elements Conference - http://nice.sandia.gov/videos.html

It started last year and was expanded greatly for this past February's conference to a 3-day event.

There were many outstanding talks there on many levels and describing many variations of the approaches all aimed at developing 'brain-inspired' alternatives to our Von Neumann/Turing architecture in place now for almost 70 years.

In my mind, the best individual approaches they and several others have described over the past few years cover most of the topics brought up at RC2 but in a much more comprehensive and cohesive manner. That is, these approaches contain the key elements of 'approximate computing', 'augmented CMOS', and of course neuromorphic.

There are other even more exciting and capable research projects going on which weren't discussed at this event, but I collectively there has been tremendous progress over just the past couple of years which has generated a strong new momentum which in turn will further accelerate the work to develop the next computing platform. Conferences, journals, workshops, and new funded programs have been developing to fuel this momentum. Despite all of this, most people it seems aren't yet fully aware of all of this activity, but that issue too is starting to be addressed as the main stream media has begun to pick up on this emerging world.

It's an exciting time to be involved in, and although similar in feeling to the way we felt in the 70's and 80's when both computing and communications went 'personal', the possibilities being opened by these new approaches are many times greater.