METASPIN is a project funded by the Pathfinder program of the European Innovation Council, under the new Horizon Europe programme (2021-2027) of the European Union, which supports the exploration of bold ideas for radically new technologies.
In METASPIN we envision a radically new low-power artificial synapse technology based on spintronics nanodevices that will prevent catastrophic forgetting, i.e. the loss of memory of previously learned tasks upon learning new ones, a major flaw currently faced by all artificial intelligence applications. The ultimate goal of this project is to integrate this advanced synaptic technology and learning algorithms into an ANN demonstrator to test multitask learning on proof-of-concept tasks inspired by medical AI, and assess the impact of metaplasticity in catastrophic forgetting.
Our consortium has been assembled specifically to cover the wide range of skills necessary to achieve our goals, to maximize its potential through a reduced number of participants and to establish a critical mass of expertise and activities. METASPIN has partners expert in all fields vital to the success of our project such as material science including, interface and ionic engineering and chemical/structural characterisation. We are also particularly well positioned to tackle the challenges in device physics in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic spintronics, nanofabrication, neuromorphic algorithms and circuit design, and computational neuroscience.
The project main objectives are:
(i) develop a new class of neuromorphic hardware using magneto-ionics to support synaptic metaplasticity (assigning a ‘hidden value’ to the states of artificial synapses to encode how important each state is);
(ii) develop Artifical Neural Network (ANN) learning schemes that can learn with mitigated catastrophic forgetting.
Coordinator: Université Paris Saclay, France
Participants: Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic; CNR-IMM, Italy; Forschungzentrum Jülich, Germany; HawAI.Tech,France; Singulus Technologies,Germany; Spin-Ion Technologies, France; University of Zurich, Switzerland
CNR Principal Investigator: Alessio Lamperti
Involved Key Personnel: Sabina Spiga, Roberto Mantovan
