James B. Aimone
Center for Computing Research, Sandia National Laboratories
Builder The claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open
James B. Aimone is a computational neuroscientist and Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff in the Center for Computing Research at Sandia National Laboratories. His research bridges biological neural circuit modeling, including adult neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus, with large-scale spiking algorithms on neuromorphic silicon.
With Felix Wang, Bradley H. Theilman, Fred Rothganger, William Severa, and Craig M. Vineyard, Aimone co-authored Neuromorphic Simulation of Drosophila Melanogaster Brain Connectome on Loihi 2 (arXiv:2508.16792). Their team partitioned the complete adult fruit fly brain connectome from the FlyWire Consortium (roughly 140,000 neurons and 50 million synapses) across 12 Intel Loihi 2 neuromorphic chips, overcoming hardware fan-in and fan-out memory limits to execute event-driven spike routing orders of magnitude faster than conventional CPU/GPU simulators.
Aimone carries the Builder classification on this site. By proving that an organism-scale biological connectome with irregular, recurrent topology can run in real time on asynchronous neuromorphic hardware, his group establishes the silicon execution layer required by substrate-independent brain emulation.
Known for. Neuromorphic algorithms, adult Drosophila FlyWire connectome simulation on Intel Loihi 2, adult hippocampal neurogenesis modeling
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James B. Aimone is listed with the other builders, who hold that the claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.