Cognitive Computing: Building A Machine That Can Learn From Experience

Description

Cognitive Computing: Building A Machine That Can Learn From Experience

ScienceDaily (Dec. 23, 2008) — Suppose you want to build a computer that operates like the brain of a mammal. How hard could it be? After all, there are supercomputers that can decode the human genome, play chess and calculate prime numbers out to 13 million digits.

But University of Wisconsin-Madison research psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, who was recently selected to take part in the creation of a "cognitive computer," says the goal of building a computer as quick and flexible as a small mammalian brain is more daunting than it sounds.

Tononi, professor of psychiatry at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and an internationally known expert on consciousness, is part of a team of collaborators from top institutions who have been awarded a $4.9 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the first phase of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project.

Tononi and scientists from Columbia University and IBM will work on the "software" for the thinking computer, while nanotechnology and supercomputing experts from Cornell, Stanford and the University of California-Merced will create the "hardware." Dharmendra Modha of IBM is the principal investigator.

“Every neuron in the brain knows that something has changed,” Tononi explains. “It tells the brain, ‘I got burned, and if you want to change, this is the time to do it.’’

Thus, a cat landing on a hot stovetop not only jumps off immediately, it learns not to do that again.

The idea is to create a computer capable of sorting through multiple streams of changing data, to look for patterns and make logical decisions.

There's another requirement: The finished cognitive computer should be as small as a the brain of a small mammal ...

Original URL

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081221215537.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081221215537.htm