Cognitive computing

Pinak Das
6th Sem CSE

The brain is fundamentally different from and complementary to today’s computers. The brain can exhibit awe-inspiring function of sensation, perception, action, interaction, and cognition. It can deal with ambiguity and interact with real-world, complex environments in a context-dependent fashion. And yet, it consumes less power than a light bulb and occupies less space than a 2-liter bottle of soda. The long term mission behind computing has always been to discover & demonstrate the algorithms of brains and deliver cool, compact cognitive computers that that complements today’s von Neumman computers and approach mammalian-scale intelligence. We are pursuing a combination of computational neuroscience, supercomputing, and nanotechnology to achieve this vision.

Two major steps are proving to be major leap towards the development cognitive computing. This will provide a unique workbench for exploring a vast number of hypotheses of the structure and computational dynamics of the brain, and further our quest of building a cool, compact cognitive computing chip.
First, using Dawn Blue Gene / P supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab with 147,456 processors and 144 TB of main memory, we achieved a simulation with 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. This is equivalent to 1,000 cognitive computing chips each with 1 million neurons and 10 billion synapses, and exceeds the scale of cat cerebral cortex. The simulation ran 100 to 1,000 times slower than real-time.
Second, a new algorithm was developed, Blue Matter, that exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging. Mapping the wiring diagram of the brain is crucial to untangling its vast communication network and understanding how it represents and processes information.
Why do we need cognitive computing? How could cognitive computing help build a smarter planet?
As the amount of digital data that we create continues to grow massively and the world becomes more instrumented and interconnected, there is a need for new kinds of computing systems – imbued with a new intelligence that can spot hard-to-find patterns in vastly varied kinds of data, both digital and sensory; analyze and integrate information real-time in a context-dependent way; and deal with the ambiguity found in complex, real-world environments. Cognitive computing offers the promise of entirely new computing architectures, system designs and programming paradigms that will meet the needs of the instrumented and interconnected world of tomorrow.
How will your current project to design a computer similar to the human brain change the everyday computing experience?
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 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 think that cognitive computing has the ability to profoundly transform the world and bring about entirely new computing architectures and, possibly even, industries.
What is the ultimate goal?
Cognitive computing seeks to engineer the mind by reverse engineering the brain. The mind arises from the brain, which is made up of billions of neurons that are liked by an internet like network. An emerging discipline, cognitive computing is about building the mind, by understanding the brain. It synthesizes neuroscience, computer science, psychology, philosophy, and mathematics to understand and mechanize the mental processes. Cognitive computing will lead to a universal computing platform that can handle a wide variety of spatio-temporally varying sensor streams.
Career Opportunities in Cognitive Computing
IBM has recently won Phase 1 of the DARPA SYNAPSE project that seeks to discover, demonstrate, and deliver algorithms of the brain via a combination of (computational) neuroscience, supercomputing, and nanotechnology.
We are seeking world-class candidates with expertise in one or more of the following areas: computational neuroscience (spiking computation, synaptic plasticity, structural plasticity), reinforcement learning, nonlinear dynamical systems, systems of coupled difference equations, neuroanatomy (gray matter, white matter), neurophysiology, neuromodulation, network analysis, neuromorphic chip design, analog VLSI, digital VLSI, ultra low-power computing, asynchronous VLSI, address events, circuit simulation, chip layout, chip testing, large-scale simulations, MPI (message passing interface), programming distributed memory machines, visualization, and virtual environments (USARSim) for cognitive task design. Interdisciplinary candidates with background in computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, and computational neuroscience are strongly encouraged to apply. Outstanding communication skills, ability to interact with a large, technically diverse, distributed team, demonstrated publication record, and relentless focus on project metrics and milestones are a must.