The Misha Mahowald Prize Awards
The Misha Mahowald Prize (MMP) recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of neuromorphic engineering. Neuromorphic engineering is defined as the construction of artificial computing systems which implement key computational principles found in natural nervous systems. Understanding how to build such systems may enable a new generation of intelligent devices, able to interact in real-time in uncertain real-world conditions under severe power constraints, as biological brains do.
The winner of the 2022 MMP will receive a certificate and USD $10,000.
The Mahowald Early Career Award (MECA) is a separate recognition for individual Master's, PhD, and early postdoctoral students.
The Misha Mahowald Prize was established in 2016 by iniLabs, an organization based in Switzerland dedicated to the promotion of research and applications of brain-like computation. From 2019 onwards the Prize is being managed by iniForum.
Prizes 2022
The MMP jury has awarded the 2022 Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering to a team led by Nitish Thakor at the Johns Hopkins University, for their pioneering work on "Neuromoprhic e-Dermis for Restoring Complex Touch" that brings tactile perception to humans with a prosthetic arm.
The MECA jury has awarded the 2022 Mahowald Early Career Award to Chang Gao (now at TU Delft) for the project "Accelerating Recurrent Neural Networks with Neuromorphic Principles". The project introduces efficient computing using the neuromorphic principles of spatial and temporal sparsity, leading to an energy-efficient accelerator for edge RNN computing.
Prize 2021
The 2021 Misha Mahowald Prize has been awarded to two teams of researchers who used neuromorphic principles to build devices that help disabled humans improve sensory and motor interaction with the world.
The Jury found that these two submissions were tied for first place, and have recommended that the teams receive separate prize citations, but share the prize money.
Prize 2020
The Prize Jury have unanimously awarded the 2020 Misha Mahowald Prize to the team led by Prof. Shih-Chii Liu for their pioneering work on ”Hearing with Silicon Cochleas".
Special Award 2020
The Jury have also conferred a Special Posthumous Award on the late Prof. Karlheinz Meier, in recognition of his exceptional contributions to the field of Neuromorphic Engineering.
Prize 2019
The independent jury awarded the 2019 prize to the group of Prof. Greg Cohen at Western Sydney University and presented it in an online ceremony during the 2020 Telluride Neuromorphic workshop (due to Covid-19 travel restrictions).
No Award could be made for 2018.
Prize 2017
The independent jury awarded the 2017 Prize to the group of Prof. Davide Scaramuzza at the University of Zurich, and presented in a ceremony at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich on 19 June 2017.
Prize 2016
The inaugural 2016 prize was won by the IBM TrueNorth Project, led by Dharmendra S. Modha. The prize was presented in a ceremony at IBM Research – Almaden on 11 August 2016.