Sergio Davies

Postgraduate Student
Room number: IT-302
Email: daviess @at@ cs.man.ac.uk
Homepage: http://apt.cs.man.ac.uk/people/daviess/
Other contact details

I am a PhD student at the School Of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. I have been with the APT Group since September 2009, supervised by Steve Furber.

Biography

I graduated (equivalent to MEng) in 2006 in telecommunication engineering at the University of Naples "Federico II", Italy. In 2006 I won a Ph.D. student position at the University of Salerno, Italy on real-time traffic monitoring. In 2007 I quitted the Ph.D. course and I started working for Nolan Norton Italia s.r.l. - KPMG, Rome, Italy, where I was a consultant in the IT sector for public institutions, banks and telecommunication companies. In 2009 I accepted a position of Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester.

Research interests

I'm currently involved in the SpiNNaker project, a universal large-scale real-time spiking neural network simulator.
My research is focusing on learning rules in spiking spiking neural networks, and on the efficient implementation of those in the SpiNNaker simulator.
In addition to this main research topic, I have been interested in other two topics: a real-time interface with between a host computer and the SpiNNaker board to inject and receive spikes to/from the SpiNNaker board (also known as Spikeserver), and the generation of the synaptic interconnection pattern directly on-board the SpiNNaker system.
My future research plans involve synaptic rewiring as improvement of common synaptic learning rules, and these would be the convergence point of all my research interests.

Publications

Here is a list of the publications I've contributed. Check the publications section for more details:

• Xin Jin, Mikel Lujan, Luis A. Plana, Sergio Davies, Steve Temple and Steve Furber
  "Modeling Spiking Neural Networks on SpiNNaker"
  
• Xin Jin, Francesco Galluppi, Cameron Patterson, Alexander Rast, Sergio Davies, Steve Temple and Steve Furber
  "Algorithm and Software for Simulation of Spiking Neural Networks on the Multi-Chip SpiNNaker System"
  
• Xin Jin, Alexander Rast, Francesco Galluppi, Sergio Davies and Steve Furber
  "Implementing Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity on SpiNNaker Neuromorphic Hardware"
  
• Frencesco Galluppi, Alexander Rast, Sergio Davies, and Steve Furber
  "A general-purpose model translation system for a universal neural chip"
  
• Sergio Davies, Cameron Patterson, Francesco Galluppi, Alexander Rast, David Lester and Steve Furber
  "Interfacing Real-Time Spiking I/O with the SpiNNaker neuromimetic architecture"
  
• Alexander Rast, Francesco Galluppi, Sergio Davies, Luis A. Plana, Thomas Sharp and Steve Furber
  "An Event-Driven Model for the SpiNNaker Virtual Synaptic Channel"
  
• Sergio Davies, Alexander Rast, Francesco Galluppi and Steve Furber
  "A forecast-based biologically-plausible STDP learning rule"
  
• Sergio Davies, Alexander Rast, Francesco Galluppi and Steve Furber
  "Maintaining Real-Time Synchrony on SpiNNaker"
  
• Alexander Rast, Francesco Galluppi, Sergio Davies, Luis Plana, Cameron Patterson, Thomas Sharp, David Lester, Steve Furber
  "Concurrent Heterogeneous Neural Model Simulation on Real-Time Neuromimetic Hardware"
  
• Andrew Webb, Sergio Davies and David Lester
  "Spiking Neural PID Controllers"
  

Relevant documents

• COMP 7000 presentation pdf file;
• Presentation about CiteULike (article web management tool) zip file;
• SpiNNaker meeting presentation pdf file (date: 11-03-2010);
• Presentation about CapoCaccia Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop 2010 zip file;
• Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop 2010 video on youtube and results (note: self-signed certificate which you may need to accept and import to be able to view this site);
• Presentation made at IJCNN2010 - Barcelona, Spain about STDP implementation on SpiNNaker pdf file;
• SpiNNaker meeting presentation about IJCNN2010 - Barcelona, Spain pdf file (date: 11-08-2010). Thanks to Alex for this;
• First year interview presentation zip file;
• First year long report zip file;
• First year short report zip file;
• Presentation about Subversion code management system (aka SVN) zip file;
• Second year poster pdf file;
• ICONIP 2010 presentation pdf file;
• SpiNNaker line following youtube link and video file;
• ACM computing frontiers 2011 presentation pdf file;
• ACM computing frontiers 2011 poster pdf file;
• Poster presented at the Manchester Neuroscience Symposium jpg file;
• Telluride newspaper frontpage pdf file and reference in the University News;
• Presentation made during Telluride workshop regarding the SpiNNaker system pdf file;
• Presentation made at IJCNN2011 - San Jose, California about the STDP TTS pdf file;
• Research symposium2011 presentation pdf and ppt file;

Teaching assistantships

During my PhD course I've been TA in these courses:

Course	Name
COMP 10211	Fundamentals of Computer Engineering
COMP 12111	Fundamentals of Computer Engineering
COMP 15111	Fundamentals of Computer Architecture
COMP 22712	Microcontrollers
COMP 25111	Operating systems
COMP 26120	Algorithms and Imperative Programming
COMP 28512	Mobile systems
COMP 32111	System-on-chip Modelling with SystemC

In addition, on the 14th November 2011 I have been lecturing for the course COMP 32111 the Timed Transaction Level Model (TLM).
If you require the slides of the lecture, please send me an e-mail.