SiliconBurmuin: A Horizon Europe propelled Neurocomputing Initiative in the Basque Country

SiliconBurmuin is aimed at creating a multi-disciplinary neurocomputing community in the Basque Country, bringing together technology and scientific research centres and industry companies. This community will: (1) identify key biological structures and mechanisms that play a major role in vision across species, and (2) transform this knowledge into novel mathematical formalisms, neuromorphic designs and algorithms to solve industry challenges and enable new experiments of interest in neuroscience and clinical research. To achieve the latter objective in a time-effective manner, SiliconBurmuin will draw strong connections with the ongoing Horizon Europe NimbleAI project, with which it shares coordination. This is expected to allow reinforcement of ideas, knowledge and technology via a common prototyping platform where to implement IP from both projects. In addition to describing the research objectives and direction of SiliconBurmuin, this paper posits that co-coordination and co-funding of aligned projects at EU and regional levels might well be a catalyst for raising regional self-awareness of own potential and develop it to help fulfill global challenges, such as semiconductor sovereignty.