Dr. Principe is the Founder and Director of the Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory (CNEL), a world renown center for neural network research.

Three Professors work in the CNEL, along with 25 to 30 graduate students.

The foremost contribution of the laboratory was the introduction of the gamma neural model, specially designed for the processing of time varying signals with neural networks. A patent was issued for the invention. Since then the gamma model has been applied with very good results to speech recognition, system identification, noise cancellation, and automatic target recognition. The gamma model is applied in the discrimination stage of the MIT/Lincoln Laboratory SAIP (semi-automatic image processing) ATR system funded by DARPA.

Presently the CNEL is conducting research in the processing of non-Gaussian, non-stationary and nonlinear signal models, using information theoretic learning, mixture of experts and nonlinear dynamics.