This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems, Living Machines 2017, held in Stanford, CA, USA, in July 2017.The 42 full and 19 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The theme of the conference encompasses biomimetic methods for manufacture, repair and recycling inspired by natural processes such as reproduction, digestion, morphogenesis and metamorphosis.

In the current age of information explosion, newly invented technological sensors and software are now tightly integrated with our everyday lives. Many sensor processing algorithms have incorporated some forms of computational intelligence as part of their core framework in problem solving. These algorithms have the capacity to generalize and discover knowledge for themselves and learn new information whenever unseen data are captured. The primary aim of sensor processing is to develop techniques to interpret, understand, and act on information contained in the data. The interest of this book is in developing intelligent signal processing in order to pave the way for smart sensors. This involves mathematical advancement of nonlinear signal processing theory and its applications that extend far beyond traditional techniques. It bridges the boundary between theory and application, developing novel theoretically inspired methodologies targeting both longstanding and emergent signal processing applications. The topic ranges from phishing detection to integration of terrestrial laser scanning, and from fault diagnosis to bio-inspiring filtering. The book will appeal to established practitioners, along with researchers and students in the emerging field of smart sensors processing.

One of the most striking properties of biological systems is their ability to learn and adapt to ever changing environmental conditions, tasks and stimuli. It emerges from a number of different forms of plasticity, that change the properties of the computing substrate, mainly acting on the modification of the strength of synaptic connections that gate the flow of information across neurons. Plasticity is an essential ingredient for building artificial autonomous cognitive agents that can learn to reliably and meaningfully interact with the real world. For this reason, the neuromorphic community at large has put substantial effort in the design of different forms of plasticity and in putting them to practical use. These plasticity forms comprise, among others, Short Term Depression and Facilitation, Homeostasis, Spike Frequency Adaptation and diverse forms of Hebbian learning (e.g. Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity). This special research topic collects the most advanced developments in the design of the diverse forms of plasticity, from the single circuit to the system level, as well as their exploitation in the implementation of cognitive systems.

Neurophysiology and biology provide useful starting points to help us understand and build better audio processing systems. The papers in this special issue address hardware implementations, spiking networks, sound identification, and attention decoding.

Neuromorphic engineering has just reached its 25th year as a discipline. In the first two decades neuromorphic engineers focused on building models of sensors, such as silicon cochleas and retinas, and building blocks such as silicon neurons and synapses. These designs have honed our skills in implementing sensors and neural networks in VLSI using analog and mixed mode circuits. Over the last decade the address event representation has been used to interface devices and computers from different designers and even different groups. This facility has been essential for our ability to combine sensors, neural networks, and actuators into neuromorphic systems. More recently, several big projects have emerged to build very large scale neuromorphic systems. The Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop (since 1994) and the CapoCaccia Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop (since 2009) have been instrumental not only in creating a strongly connected research community, but also in introducing different groups to each other’s hardware. Many neuromorphic systems are first created at one of these workshops. With this special research topic, we showcase the state-of-the-art in neuromorphic systems.