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Stefan Harrer
Lead Brain-Inspired Computing Research, Research Staff Member, IBM Research - Australia
In 2015 Stefan co-founded the Brain-Inspired Computing Research programme of IBM Research – Australia and now leads it as an IBM Research Staff Member and Honorary Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Neural Engineering at the University of Melbourne.

His team spearheads an effort to employ IBM’s recently introduced cognitive TrueNorth chip to develop artificial intelligence-enabled biomedical and healthcare solutions at the intersection of neuroscience and neuromorphic computing. Since joining IBM Research in 2008, Stefan has worked on biotechnology and nanotechnology research projects in New York at IBM Albany Nanotech and the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as well as at IBM Research - Australia. He has held positions as Lead of the Lab Innovation Development Team and Science Technical Assistant to the Lab Director and now is a member of the Senior Lab Leadership Team at IBM Research – Australia.

Stefan has authored and co-authored 40 technical publications, is an inventor on 25 issued patents and has more than 20 patents pending. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Chemical Society, and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience. Stefan has received a Research Scholarship from UC Berkeley, a Karl Chang Innovation Fund Grant from MIT and Research Grants from the NIH and the Australian Research Council.

His work has been featured in WIRED Magazine, Popular Science, Scientific American, TechTimes, Engadget and Fast Company amongst others. He holds a PhD in EECS from the Technical University Munich and an Honours Masters Certificate in Technology Management from the Center for Digital Technology and Management.


Wearables to Thinkables: Decoding Brain States using Deep Learning and IBM's Brain-Inspired TrueNorth Chip

Wearables will be transformed into Thinkables offering continuous, cognitive, real-time analytics of measured biometric and biological data at the point of sensing. Thereby ultra-low power neuromorphic platforms - such as IBM’s recently introduced TrueNorth chip - could play a key role in connecting on-body nanobiosensors directly with deep-learning technology for instant analytics, prediction and interfacing with artificial intelligence systems.