Biography

Ioana Sporea joined the University of Surrey as a PhD student in 2008, under the supervision of Dr Andre Gruning.

She graduated from Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania in 2008 with a degree (Engineer Diploma) in Computer Science. She is currently working towards her PhD, within the NICE research group, where she is studying supervised learning algorithms for feed-forward spiking neural networks.  

She is also a member of IEEE and two of its societies: IEEE Computational Intelligence and IEEE Women in Engineering.

Research Interests

My main research interests include spiking neurons and artificial intelligence, psychology and cognitive science.

My current project consists of developing a new supervised learning algorithm for feed-forward spiking neural networks. The algorithm can be applied to neurons firing multiple spikes in all layers, allowing the network to associate sequences of spikes. The synaptic weights modifications are based on spike-timing dependent plasticity processes, thus the algorithm is not limited to a specific neuron model or to a particular pattern encoding.

Publications

I. Sporea, A. Grüning, “Reference time in SpikeProp”, Proceeding of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2011), San Jose, USA, August 2011.

N. Yusoff, I. Sporea, A. Grüning, “Neural Networks in Cognitive Science – An introduction”, in P. Lio' & D. Verma (Eds.), Biologically Inspired Networking and Sensing: Algorithms and Architectures, IGI Global, 2011.

I. Sporea, A. Grüning, “A distributed model of memory for the McGurk effect”, Proceeding of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2010), Barcelona, Spain, July 2010.

I. Sporea, A. Grüning, “Modelling the McGurk effect”, Proceedings of the 18th European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks (ESANN 2010), Bruges, Belgium, April 2010.

Teaching

I teach on the following modules:

• Object-Oriented Software Engineering
• Programming Fundamentals
• Software Engineering