Tobi DelbruckView profile
Professor
Tobi Delbruck is a titular professor of physics and electrical engineering at ETH Zurich, where he leads the Sensors Group at the Institute for Neuroinformatics (INI) in Zurich, Switzerland. He collaborates closely with Shih-Chii Liu and Giacomo Indiveri as part of the 'hardware groups' at INI. Delbruck has also served as visiting faculty at Caltech and is a Fellow of the IEEE. His work focuses on bio-inspired and neuromorphic event-based sensory processing systems. Professor Delbruck's research spans multiple areas of neuromorphic engineering, with particular emphasis on event-based vision systems and low-power analog VLSI circuits. His work has significantly advanced the field of Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS), which mimic the human retina's response to changes in brightness rather than capturing full frames. This approach enables extremely low-latency vision processing with minimal power consumption, making it ideal for high-speed applications and robotics. His research has applications in robotics, autonomous systems, and low-power embedded vision. Delbruck is an active contributor to the neuromorphic engineering community, co-organizing the annual Telluride Workshop on Neuromorphic Engineering and serving in leadership roles with IEEE. He has authored numerous influential publications and co-authored books including "Event-Based Neuromorphic Systems" and "Analog VLSI: Circuits and Principles." His jAER (Java Address-Event Representation) project provides open-source tools for real-time event-based sensory processing. Analysis of his recent publications shows a clear trend toward integrating event-based vision with deep learning techniques and applying these systems to practical robotics problems. His scientific achievements have been recognized with multiple awards including: IEEE Fellow Winner of Best Live Demonstration award at ISCAS 2012 Honorable Mention Award from Sensory Systems Technical Committee at ISCAS 2012 Overall Best Student Paper Award and Best Paper Award from Sensory Systems Technical Committee at ISCAS 2010 Winner of the 2006 ISSCC Jan Van Vessem Outstanding European Paper Award Professor Delbruck actively mentors students and has supervised numerous PhD and Master's theses in the areas of neuromorphic engineering and event-based vision systems. His group has secured significant research funding from various sources to support their innovative work in bio-inspired sensory processing. He teaches courses on "Electronics for Physicists II (Digital)" and "Neuromorphic Engineering," helping to train the next generation of researchers in this field. The Sensors Group at INI, which Delbruck leads, operates state-of-the-art facilities for designing and testing neuromorphic vision systems. The group maintains close collaborations with researchers worldwide and has developed several important open-source resources including the jAER project and bias generator design kits. Their work continues to push the boundaries of what's possible with event-based sensory processing, with applications ranging from high-speed robotics to low-power embedded vision systems.
