IBM seeks to simulate brain
Initial research will focus on demonstrating nanoscale, low-power synapse-like devices, with the long-term mission to demonstrate low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence.
By Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News -- EDN, November 21, 2008
IBM Research and five universities have partnered to create low-power-consumption and compact-sized computing systems that they expect will simulate and emulate the brain’s abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction, and cognition.
IBM’s proposal, “Cognitive computing via synaptronics and supercomputing,” (C2S2) outlines research to be conducted over the next nine months in areas including synaptronics, material science, neuromorphic circuitry, supercomputing simulations, and virtual environments.
Encouraging the effort, IBM and its collaborators have been awarded $4.9 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the first phase of DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative.
Initial C2S2 research will focus on demonstrating nanoscale, low-power synapse-like devices and on "uncovering the functional microcircuits of the brain," IBM said, noting that the long-term mission of C2S2 is to demonstrate low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence.
IBM noted the field of artificial intelligence research has previously focused on individual aspects of engineering intelligent machines. Cognitive computing, however, seeks to engineer holistic intelligent machines.
IBM's end goal is ubiquitously deployed computers imbued with a new intelligence that can integrate information from a variety of sensors and sources, deal with ambiguity, respond in a context-dependent way, learn over time, and carry out pattern recognition to solve difficult problems based on perception, action, and cognition in complex, real-world environments.
“We believe that our cognitive computing initiative will help shape the future of computing in a significant way, bringing to bear new technologies that we haven’t even begun to imagine," Josephine Cheng, IBM fellow and VP of the company's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, said in a statement Thursday. "The initiative underscores IBM’s capabilities in bold, exploratory research and interest in powerful collaborations to understand the way the world works.”
C2S2's team of IBM researchers will be led by Dr. Dharmendra Modha, manager of the company's cognitive computing initiative. The IBM researchers will be joined by professors from Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center, and the University of California-Merced.
To be sure, this is not the first cognitive computing effort from IBM. The company's cognitive computing team has previously demonstrated the near-real-time simulation at a scale of a small mammal brain using cognitive computing algorithms with IBM’s BlueGene supercomputer.
IBM said that with that simulation capability, the C2S2 researchers are experimenting with various mathematical hypotheses of brain function and structure as they work toward discovering the brain’s core computational micro and macro circuits.
