4. What sparked your interest in engineering computing systems?
Modha: Neuroscience has experienced a veritable revolution furnishing a tremendous amount of quantitative data about the structure and dynamics of the brain. At the same time, supercomputers with exponentially increasing computation, communication and memory capacities are becoming available. As I became aware of the possibilities engendered by a convergence of these two trends, I realized that the time is now ripe for a bottom-up approach to understanding how the mind arises from the brain. As a first step in this quest, at IBM, we have recently built a near-real-time mammalian scale simulator (C2) that can integrate—in a single computational platform—the wealth of neuroscience. C2 is akin to a linear accelerator, an electron microscope, and is kind of a wind-tunnel for the mind.
5. How will your current project to design a computer similar to the human brain change the everyday computing experience?
Modha: While we have algorithms and computers to deal with structured data (for example, age, salary, etc.) and semi-structured data (for example, text and web pages), no mechanisms exist that parallel the brain’s uncanny ability to act in a context-dependent fashion while integrating ambiguous information across different senses (for example, sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) and coordinating multiple motor modalities. Success of cognitive computing will allow us to man and mine the boundary between digital and physical worlds where raw sensory information abounds. Imagine, for example, instrumenting the world’s oceans with temperature, pressure, wave height, humidity and turbidity sensors, and imagine streaming this information in real-time to a cognitive computer that may be able to detect spatiotemporal correlations, much like we can pick out a face in a crowd. We can profoundly transform the productivity and security of the society.
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