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Kwabena Adu Boahen (born 22 September 1964) (not to be confused with Kwabena Adu-Boahene, former Director of the National Signals Bureau in Ghana, who is no relation) is a Ghanaian-born Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Kwabena Boahen, PhD, Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University. He previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the son of celebrated Ghanaian historian and politician Professor Albert Adu Boahen.
He received his B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering in 1989 from Johns Hopkins University and his PhD in computation and neural systems in 1997 from the California Institute of Technology, where he was advised by Carver Mead. For his PhD thesis, Boahen designed and fabricated a silicon chip emulating the functioning of the retina.K. A. Boahen, "A retinomorphic vision system", IEEE Micro, Vol. 16, issue 5, pp. 30–39, 1996. Boahen's father, Albert Adu Boahen, was a professor of history at the University of Ghana and an advocate for democracy in Ghana.
Boahen often speaks of the promise of efficient computing as an inspiration for his work, writing: "A typical room-size supercomputer weighs approximately 1,000 times more, occupies 10,000 times more space and consumes a millionfold more power than does the cantaloupe-size lump of neural tissue that makes up the brain."K Boahen, "Neuromorphic Microchips", Scientific American, vol. 292, no. 5, pp. 56–63, May 2005.
With contributions in circuit design, chip architecture, and neuroscience, Boahen has brought together ideas from many disciplines to build novel computer chips that emulate the brain. Widely renowned for his engineering accomplishments, Boahen was named an IEEE fellow in 2016. Specific contributions throughout his career include the development of the current-mode subthreshold CMOS circuit design paradigm, the address-event approach to communicating spikes between neuromorphic chips, and the scalable design of multi-chip systems. Boahen's chips are mixed-mode: they employ analog circuits for computation and digital circuits for communication.
Boahen's work has demonstrated that neuromorphic computer chips are capable of reproducing many types of brain phenomena across a large range of scales. Examples include ion-channel dynamicsK. M. Hynna and K. Boahen, "Thermodynamically-Equivalent Silicon Models of Ion Channels", Neural Computation, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 327–350, February 2007. (individual molecules), excitable membrane behavior (individual neurons), the orientation tuning of neurons in Visual CortexP Merolla and K Boahen, "A Recurrent Model of Orientation Maps with Simple and Complex Cells", Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16, S Thrun and L Saul, eds, MIT Press, pp. 995–1002, 2004. (individual cortical columns), and neural synchronyJ V Arthur and K Boahen, "Synchrony in Silicon: The Gamma Rhythm", IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, vol. PP, issue 99, 2007. (individual cortical areas). Utilizing these breakthroughs, Boahen's Stanford lab built the first neuromorphic system with one million spiking neurons (and billions of synapses).B V Benjamin, P Gao, E McQuinn, S Choudhary, A R Chandrasekaran, J-M Bussat, R Alvarez-Icaza, J V Arthur, P A Merolla, and K Boahen, "Neurogrid: A Mixed-Analog-Digital Multichip System for Large-Scale Neural Simulations", Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 102, no. 5, pp. 699–716, 2014. This system, Neurogrid, emulates networks of cortical neurons in real time while consuming only a few watts of power. In contrast, simulating one million interconnected cortical neurons in real-time using traditional super-computers requires as much power as several thousand households.
Boahen popularized the word retinomorphic, in reference to optical sensors inspired by biological .
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