IBM Cognitive Computing Research Team is Reverse Engineering the Brain
February 12, 2009
The IBM Team that won the DARPA SyNAPSE Cognitive Computing Contract has a sensible approach to new hardware architectures and machine learning.
“The plan is to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain,” says Dharmendra Modha, manager of the cognitive computing project at IBM Almaden Research Center.
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One of the main challenges to building this system in hardware, explains Boahen, is that each neuron connects to others through 8,000 synapses. It takes about 20 transistors to implement a synapse, so building the silicon equivalent of 220 trillion synapses is a tall order, indeed.
“You end up with a technology where the cost is very unfavorable,” says Boahen. “That’s why we have to use nanotech to implement synapses in a way that will make them much smaller and more cost-effective.”
Boahen and his team are trying to create a device smaller than a single transistor that can do the job of 20 transistors. “We are essentially inventing a new device,” he says.
Meanwhile, at the University of California-Merced, Kello and his team are creating a virtual environment that could train the simulated brain to experience and learn. They are using the Unreal Tournament videogame engine to help train the system. When it’s ready, it will be used to teach the neural networks how to make decisions and learn along the way.
Wired Article Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
More info about the DARPA Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) contract.
