Section: Application Domains

Bayesian Reasoning

Participants: Emmanuel Mazer, Marvin Faix

The development of modern computers is mainly based on increase of performances and decrease of size and energy consumption, with no notable modification of the basic principles of computation. In particular, all the components perform deterministic and exact operations on sets of binary signals. These constraints obviously impede further sizable progresses in terms of speed, miniaturization and power consumption. The main goal of the project MicroBayes is to investigate a radically different approach, using stochastic bit streams to perform computations. The aim of this project is to show that stochastic architectures can outperform standard computers to solve complex inference problems both in terms of execution speed and of power consumption. We will demonstrate the feasibility on two applications involving low level information processing from sensor signals, namely sound source localization and separation.