IEEE 125th Anniversary Media Event: Cognitive Computing

Currently, Dr. Dharmendra Modha and his team are focusing on demonstrating nanoscale, low power synapse-like devices;  uncovering the functional microcircuits of the brain;  developing analog and asynchronous circuits; scaling supercomputing simulations; studying white matter architecture of the brain and developing virtual environments. 

The end goal is to create ubiquitously deployed computers imbued with 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. The team hopes to achieve this within the next decade and believes it will lead to novel cognitive systems, computing architectures, programming paradigms and numerous practical applications such as: understanding and mining live, streaming data from sensor networks and audio/video feeds, macro- and micro-economic data analysis and trading in a financial setting, and, even gaming. Cognitive computing has potential to bring about dramatic improvements in the productivity and security of society.