CAS Distinguished Lecture - J. K. Eshraghian UC Santa Cruz - Neuromorphic LLMs
Distinguished Lecture by Jason K. Eshraghian
Neuromorphic Large Language Models (LLMs)
Abstract: The brain is the perfect place to look for inspiration to develop more efficient neural networks. Inspired by the recurrent dynamics of biological neurons, this talk will present several frontier reasoning LLMs developed in my lab, from software to device deployments. Trained end-to-end in an academic lab on a full production pipeline (data curation, pre-training, to post-training and alignment) these models surpass all leading LLMs from Meta, Google and every other over-resourced company in the ~10-billion parameter regime, despite being ~5x smaller. We have deployed several of our models on neuromorphic hardware at 2-watts, bringing SoTA-level reasoning from the datacenter to the edge.
The lecture will be hosted by the Institute for NeuroInformatics (INI) at the University of Zurich, as part of the Spring 2026 colloquia series.
Registration is free but mandatory.
Date and Time
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- University of Zürich, Irchel Campus
- Institute of Neuroinformatics
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Switzerland
- Building: Y35
- Room Number: F51
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- Co-sponsored by Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zürich
- Starts 20 January 2026 11:00 PM UTC
- Ends 13 March 2026 04:00 PM UTC
- No Admission Charge
Speakers
Jason K. Eshraghian of UC Santa Cruz
Neuromorphic Large Language Models (LLMs)
Biography:
Jason K. Eshraghian is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz. He received the Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical and Electronic) and the Bachelor of Laws degrees from The University of Western Australia, WA, Australia, in 2016, where he also received the Ph.D. Degree in 2019. From 2019 to 2022, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, MI, USA. He serves as the Chair of the Neural Systems and Applications Technical Committee and as an Associate Editor for APL Machine Learning.
He has been awarded 7 IEEE Best Paper & Live Demonstration Awards), and holds a dual-IEEE Distinguished Lecturer Appointment with both the CAS and EMBS societies. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship (Australian-American Fulbright Commission), a Forrest Research Fellowship (Forrest Research Foundation), and the Endeavour Research Fellowship (Australian Government).
His research interests include neuromorphic computing, spiking neural networks, and memory circuits, and he is the developer of snnTorch, a widely used Python library used to train and model spiking neural networks (>350k downloads).
Address:UC Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, California, United States, 95064
