Spiking Neural Networks: History, Current Status and the Future

Simulated spiking neural networks have been explored for over a hundred years. Many of these networks are driven by biological considerations and an attempt to simulate brains, but others are used with little biological consideration. This paper gives some history of the development of spiking neural models, their use for modelling biological and cognitive phenomena, and for machine learning. It introduces the current state of the art in computational biological neuron and synapse modelling and plasticity. It introduces and reviews balanced spiking networks and their engineering applications. Spiking networks are also used for machine learning, with the hope that their implementation on neuromorphic hardware will bring energy and time savings. Similarly, neuromorphic hardware can enable massive parallelism, supporting larger spiking networks. The use of spiking nets for machine learning, both with biologically plausible models and without, is discussed, showing that effective models already exist. The paper concludes with some notes about implementing spiking nets and a discussion including open questions and future work.