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  The Health Record Review
by Frank Irving


Cognitive Computer Chips Reach Prototype Stage

Posted on Thu, Aug 18, 2011 - 10:00 am

The folks who created Watson are at it again. Watson, a computing system developed by IBM to understand natural human language and provide specific answers to complex questions at high speed, defeated human contestants on the game show Jeopardy earlier this year.

Now IBM researchers have unveiled experimental computer chips designed to emulate the brain’s abilities in the areas of perception, action and cognition.
 
In making the announcement on Aug. 18, IBM said the technology could yield “many orders of magnitude less power consumption and space than used in today's computers.”
 
The new “neurosynaptic” computer chips recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems, such as the brain, through advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry, according to IBM. The first two prototype chips have been fabricated at IBM’s chip-making facility in Fishkill, N.Y., and are undergoing testing at its research labs in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and San Jose, Calif.
 
“[T]hese chips won't be programmed the same way traditional computers are today,” IBM reported. “Rather, cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember -- and learn from -- the outcomes, mimicking the brains structural and synaptic plasticity.”
 
The company and its university collaborators also announced they have been awarded approximately $21 million in new funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for Phase 2 of a project called SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics). IBM said the goal of SyNAPSE is to create a system that not only analyzes complex information from multiple sensory modalities at once, but also dynamically rewires itself as it interacts with its environment -- all while rivaling the brain's compact size and low power usage.
 
"This is a major initiative to move beyond the von Neumann paradigm that has been ruling computer architecture for more than half a century," said Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research. "Future applications of computing will increasingly demand functionality that is not efficiently delivered by the traditional architecture. These chips are another significant step in the evolution of computers from calculators to learning systems, signaling the beginning of a new generation of computers and their applications in business, science and government."
 
While they contain no biological elements, IBM's first cognitive computing prototype chips use digital silicon circuits inspired by neurobiology to make up what is referred to as a "neurosynaptic core" -- with replicated synapses, neurons and axons.
 
IBM has two working prototype designs. Both cores contain 256 neurons. One core contains 262,144 programmable synapses and the other contains 65,536 learning synapses. IBM said its team has successfully demonstrated applications such as navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, associative memory and classification.
 
The company said its long-term goal is to build a chip system with 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, while consuming merely one kilowatt of power and occupying less than two liters of volume.
 
"Imagine traffic lights that can integrate sights, sounds and smells and flag unsafe intersections before disaster happens or imagine cognitive co-processors that turn servers, laptops, tablets and phones into machines that can interact better with their environments," said Dr. Modha.
 
During the next phase of SyNAPSE, IBM will collaborate with researchers at Columbia University; Cornell University; University of California, Merced; and University of Wisconsin, Madison.
 
What types of medical applications do you envision for this emerging class of cognitive computers?
 
Photo courtesy of IBM.