People have expected great things from Alice Parker, who was raised in a family of distinguished scientists and engineers. And Parker, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Southern California has delivered. She helped develop high-level (behavioral) synthesis, an automated computer design process that assists with the transformation of a behavioral description of hardware into a model of its logic and memory circuits.

Her father, a chemist, was on the team that first synthesized vitamin B1 at pharmaceutical company Merck in Charlotte, N.C. In 1941 her uncle Vannevar Bush was appointed the first science advisor to the U.S. Congress.

Parker is currently helping to develop an artificial brain that can replicate the functions of neural mechanisms believed to be important for learning and memory.

This year IEEE President-Elect Tom Coughlin interviewed Parker for her IEEE History Center oral history. It is now available on the Engineering and Technology History Wiki. This article is based on that interview.

From CAD to brain modeling

Parker’s work is focused on four areas: biomimetic neuromorphic circuits, biomimetic stereo vision, retinal and cortical neuromorphic analog circuits, and nanotechnology.

Biomimetic neuromorphic circuits mimic the brain’s short-term memory. Biomimetic stereo vision helps systems perceive objects in three dimensions. Retinal and cortical neuromorphic analog circuits simulate neural networks found in the retina and the visual cortex.

In collaboration with Chongwu Zhou, an electrical engineering professor at USC in Los Angeles, Parker is combining those research areas through the design of a biomimetic real-time cortex (BioRC), essentially an artificial brain.

They created the first synapse made with carbon-nanotube transistors as well as the first analog circuit designs of astrocytes (brain cells) that interact with circuits that model neurons to replicate the functions of neural mechanisms believed to be important for learning and memory.

“We are looking at how the brain works biologically, and we are pushing it down a level and seeing what we can emulate,” Parker says. “Can we emulate schizophrenia? Can we emulate various things that are biological?” She said the project has been “a lot of fun.”

BioRC probably will be the last big thing she works on during her career, she says.

Before she started developing the artificial brain, Parker built a sudoku-solving system that employed simulated annealing. The system, created to decrease the time it took to judge sudoku competitions, can give competitors