Who will be the first to build truly intelligent machines? Would it be a lonely investigator, a modern days Darwin that, in perfect isolation, would sail back from her/his neuroscientific Galapagos with the great truth, or... Read the rest of this entry »
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Who will will the artificial brain race?
| December 3, 2010 -
Watson will beat you at Jeopardy
| June 17, 2010
The New York Times published an article this Monday on I.B.M.'s bid to have their Watson computer system compete in a number of televised Jeopardy! episodes, a move reminiscent of the famous set of chess matches between I.B.M.'s Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov. Reading the entire report may take some time but is definitely worthwhile for anyone who's never heard a description of the set of problems involved in building such a computer system. Read the rest of this entry » -
Understanding the Competition
| February 8, 2010
In About SyNAPSE I characterized neuromorphic devices as the opposite of conventional Von Neumann processors. This is somewhat of a oversimplification, however. Modern processors are actually quite evolved from pure Von Neumann devices. They are dramatically more capable on virtually every computational workload than their heritage would suggest is possible. For neuromorphic devices to find any success in the marketplace, they’ll need to offer a significant performance gain against existing solutions, but with comparable or lesser power consumption and cost. -
Money on the brain
| March 5, 2009
Some time ago, a professor at a British university once told me that the introduction of yearly 50 pound "top-up" fees would corrupt education. He reasoned that if students could not completely concentrate on their work without undue influence, e.g. worrying about making money to pay for their education, how could they possibly engaged in the unbiased learning experience of the university? To American ears this sounds ridiculous. Some students accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and this professor is worried about his students paying 50 pounds a year!I found the statement completely histrionic back then, but I'm starting to sympathize with him more and more these days. This has become especially acute since I left the holy order of philosophy for the decidedly greener pastures of computational neuroscience. Green seems pretty good to a former philosopher, but the closer I get to it the more I worry at times (as I am certainly wont to do!). As with those 50 pounds and the undergrads, could the mighty green seriously warp the priorities of researchers?
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How to reverse-engineer the brain?
| February 28, 2009
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Reverse engineering the brain?
In a recent invited talk at the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, Lloyd Watts, neuroscientist turned entrepreneur (founder, chairman and CTO of Audience Inc., a Silicon Valley company that commercializes technology derived from auditory neuroscience research), presented his “strategy” on how to go about a gargantuan task: reverse-engineering the brain. With a military strategy analogy, the problem is the following: what is the best way to occupy an enemy territory? Should the invading army occupy simultaneously the target territory from all its borders, or should all troops focus on a narrow strip of land, occupy it, consolidate the territory and exploit its resources, and then move on to the next target? Lloyd Watts, the neuroscientist-entrepreneur, seems to suggest that the second strategy is the winning one.
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IBM Seeks to Build the Computer of the Future Based on Insights from the Brain
| February 4, 2009In december 2008, a video post has been published on Abovetopsecret.com with the title “DARPA & IBM building a “global brain” “cognitive computer” for “monitoring people”. In this video, the leader of the IBM SyNAPSE project, Dharmendra Modha, talks about SyNAPSE.
This is an excerpt from the video:
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IBM ‘burns’ the competition announcing the award of a SyNAPSE grant
| November 12, 2008IBM Researchers Look to Build 'Global Brain' Computer
IT Infrastructure
By Scott Ferguson
2008-11-20
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IBM researchers and scientists from several major universities, with the aid of a $4.9 million grant from DARPA, will look to use nanoscale technology to create new types of computers capable of cognitive thinking. The goal of the IBM research is to find whether new types of IT infrastructure and computers can not only collect data but use that data to solve problems and make decisions in the same way the human brain solves problems.
While a computer with artificial intelligence such as HAL of "2001: A Space Odyssey" remains the stuff of science fiction, IBM researchers are looking to develop technologies that will bring cognitive abilities to a new class of computers.
IBM researchers, along with scientists from several major universities, have been awarded a $4.9 million grant from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to see if they can develop computers with the ability to not only collect data but solve problems in much the same way a human brain does. -
HRL and SyNAPSE
| August 25, 2008
The following has ben published on Topix. It is one of the few articles around NOT on IBM.... Dr. Narayan Srinivasa talks about the program. HRL has a long and successful track record in modeling complex cognitive inspired architectures, which ultimately will be a great advantage in the SyNAPSE program when it will be the time to actually use the chip to perform meaningful computations. Note the typo in the article "'The follow-on phases of the project will create a technology that functions like the brain of a cat, which comprises 108 neurons and 1012 synapses,' Srinivasa said. 'The human brain has roughly 1011 neurons and 1015 synapses." The formatting got obviously screwed up... we are talking about 10^11 and 10^15 (otherwise, a cell phone chip will suffice...).