IBM Researchers Go Way Beyond AI With Cat-Like Cognitive Computing

[jimmy olsen]

Humanity ending in a machine holocaust seems to get more likely every passing day.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/68678.html

IBM Researchers Go Way Beyond AI With Cat-Like Cognitive Computing

By Pam Baker
TechNewsWorld
11/18/09 9:34 AM PT

IBM researchers have developed a cognitive computer simulation that mimics the way a cat brain processes thought, and they expect to be able to mimic human thought processes within a decade. "A cognitive computer could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of any complex data puzzle and help people make good decisions rapidly," said Daniel Kantor, medical director of Neurologique.

IBM's (NYSE: IBM) revelation at SC09 created quite a stir and immediately brought forth visions of Cylons and Hal 9000.

The cognitive computing team at IBM Research has moved significantly forward in creating a large-scale cortical simulation and a new algorithm that synthesizes neurological data -- two major milestones on the path to a cognitive computing chip. IBM says computers that mimic the human brain are just 10 years away.

This is not a mere advancement on the artificial intelligence (AI) scale. This is a different approach to computing.

"Non-cognitive computing approaches to artificial intelligence have generally led to underwhelming results: We have nothing near HAL-9000 level capabilities even after many years of trying, so there has been increasing attention on cognitive computing approaches," Steven Flinn, chief executive officer of ManyWorlds and author of the upcoming book The Learning Layer: Building the Next Level of Intellect in Your Organization, told TechNewsWorld.
AI vs. Cognitive Computing

Cognitive computing isn't your father's artificial intelligence which is to say it isn't just a new model of an old idea.

"Cognitive computing goes well beyond artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction as we know it -- it explores the concepts of perception, memory, attention, language, intelligence and consciousness," Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing at IBM Research - Almaden, told TechNewsWorld.

"Typically, in AI, one creates an algorithm to solve a particular problem," Modha said. "Cognitive computing seeks a universal algorithm for the brain. This algorithm would be able to solve a vast array of problems."

Still confused? Then try looking at it as the difference between learning and thinking.

"AI attempts to have computers learn how to learn -- for computers to make their own connections without only being constrained by their hardware and software," said Daniel Kantor, M.D., BSE, medical director of Neurologique and president-elect of the Florida Society of Neurology.

"A cognitive computer could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of any complex data puzzle and help people make good decisions rapidly," he told TechNewsWorld.

"The problem with this is that even the human brain is unable to do that," Kantor laughed. "These two technologies could be used in tandem to complement each other if the algorithms are sophisticated enough."
Aiming for Human, Landing on Cat Feet

Cognitive computing is a different beast entirely -- and right now it's looking very cat-like.

Scientists at IBM Research, in collaboration with colleagues from Berkeley Lab, have actually performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses.

Cat? How did the scientists end up exceeding the scale of cat but falling short of human rungs?

"This was the best that we could achieve given the available supercomputing resources," explained Modha. "Specifically, using DAWN Blue Gene / P supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab with 147,456 processors and 144 TB of main memory, the simulation used 1.6 billion neurons and 9 trillion synapses."

For some scale reference points, consider this:

    * A cat cortex has roughly 760 million neurons and 6 trillion synapses. So, IBM's simulation exceeds cat-scale.

    * A monkey cortex has roughly 2 billion neurons and 20 trillion synapses. IBM's simulation is roughly equal to 50 percent of monkey-scale.

    * A human cortex has 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses. IBM's simulation, then, is 4.5 percent of human-scale.

"If we have access to a supercomputer with 1 exaflops of computation and 4 petabytes of main memory, a near real-time human cortex-scale simulation would be possible," said Modha.
Elements of Cognitive Computing

Essentially, the scientists created a new algorithm called "BlueMatter" that exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture in order to measure and map the human brain. It is noninvasive, meaning subjects' skulls are not drilled into, and there are no talking human heads in bell jars a la mad scientist horror movies.

Instead, the scientists use magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging to measure and map the connections between all cortical and subcortical locations within the living brain.

The resulting wire diagram untangles the brain's communication network and helps scientists understand how the human brain represents and processes information in a tiny space and with little energy burn.

The implications are huge -- so much so that all possible uses have yet to be imagined.

"In the future, businesses and individuals will simultaneously need to monitor, prioritize, adapt and make rapid decisions based on ever-growing streams of critical data and information," explained IBM's Modha.

"A cognitive computer could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of this complex puzzle and come to a logical response, while taking into account context and previous experience," he said.

"It could have implications for mining live, streaming data from sensor networks, macro- and micro-economic data analysis and trading in a financial setting, understanding live audio and video feeds, and even the gaming industry," suggested Modha.

"It would have the ability to point out anomalies, deal Increase Customer Sales with Email Marketing -- Free Trial from VerticalResponse with constantly changing parameters, and possibly prioritize what to look at first in the data," he concluded.
Human Brain Add-On

The simulator is also an important tool for scientists to test their hypotheses for how the brain works.

"One of our highest goals in neuroengineering is to develop circuitry that can mimic the human brain, not only for a certain discrete action, but to mimic the thought process in general," explained Neurologique's Kantor.

"Such technology would allow us to use microchips [or] nanochips to augment brain function in someone who has suffered a brain injury," he said.

"It is entirely feasible that we will see such technology in the next decade, but it may not be applicable to many types of brain injuries, cautioned Kantor.

"Often damage to the brain -- from disease, traumatic brain injury or a direct blow to the head -- destroys part of a neural circuit, but leaves other parts in place," he pointed out. "This means that it would be more useful to have artificial neurons that can grow and make synaptic connections with other healthy neurons to reform a circuit."

Cognitive computing mimics the human brain by using hardware, software and by mapping or augmenting wetware.

To sum it up: Cylons and Hal are out, and Johnny Mnemonic is in.

[Neil]

I doubt machine intelligences are very dangerous.  Russian 'antivirus' malware should handle them with ease.

That reminds me:  Why haven't we annihilated the Russian race yet?

[HisMajestyBOB]

I liked this comment on Slashdot:

simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain

10: INPUT(8) $SOUND
30: IF ($SOUND == 'CAN OPENER') GOTO 140
40: DO CASE (RND(4))
50 CASE 1:
60 CLAW_FURNITURE()
70 BREAK
80 CASE 2:
90 MARK_FURNITURE()
100 BREAK
110 CASE 3:
120 SLEEP(RND(10000))
130 CASE 4:
140 PRETEND_TO_BE_NICE()
150 IF (FOOD) EAT()
160 GOTO 10
170 ENDCASE

[Maximus]

[Fate]

Can we force Timmah to put all of these one liners in a single post?

[Neil]

Can we force Timmah to put all of these one liners in a single post?

Negative.

And don't you dare try and pile onto Tim.  You're not one of the cool kids.  Tim is alright.  You're not.

[Fate]

Can we force Timmah to put all of these one liners in a single post?

Negative.

And don't you dare try and pile onto Tim.  You're not one of the cool kids.  Tim is alright.  You're not.

I really don't understand the GOPtard tendency to latch onto the mentally retarded. First Palin, now you...

[DontSayBanana]

Has anybody else been thinking how eerie the 2001 books are, in retrospect?  First Europa, and now it turns out Clarke wasn't too far off on his guess of memory capacity of a human (in 3001, they mention uploading a copy of a person's personality takes about 13 petabytes).

[Brazen]

Crappy misleading science journalism. Read more about it in more reputable journals. It's not cat-like, it merely has a similar number of simulated neurons and synapses. Alternatively read about this British project from the beginning of the year by a far better science journalist:

The way in which systems of neurons in the brain interact as a network could become the inspiration for million-processor parallel computer architectures.

The universal spiking neural network architecture (SpiNNaker) project seeks to mimic the brain's structure and function to offer massively parallel computing coupled with inbuilt redundancy that would make processors faster and more reliable.

The project, led by Manchester University computing pioneer Prof Steve Furber with contributions from Sheffield, Southampton and Cambridge Universities, has more than £5m funding from the EPSRC's Large Grant Panel. It is one of a number of projects underway around the world that are seeking to continue the exponential increases in processing power set out in Moore's Law.

In the brain, communication is achieved through electrical pulses known as spikes between axons —the point where neurons connect.

In a computer, the operation of the billions of neurons in the brain could be simulated using digital processors, and the connectivity by transmitting information packets between large numbers of processors.

Furber, ICL professor of computer engineering in Manchester's School of Computer Science, began thinking about biologically inspired forms of computer memory 10 years ago.

After some false starts, he did some research into neural-style memories and realised this approach could address problems of robustness and fault tolerance in computer engineering. Combined with advances in processor clock speeds and parallel processing, it could be used to produce powerful computer systems.

Furber hopes the project, which runs until the end of 2013, could lead to a usable million-processor machine. 'In a sense, it's a slightly artificial goal,' he said, 'but a million processors could model a billion neurons in real time. This is a very large-scale simulation, but bear in mind a billion neurons is still only one per cent of the human brain. The ultimate goal of producing something that could simulate the human brain is still pretty challenging, even with today's technology.'

The research will focus on what can be termed middle-layer processing in the brain. The firing of individual neurons and the function of larger areas of the brain are fairly well understood but the processing between the two is not.

'This is because it's fundamentally difficult to build instruments that can measure the firing patterns of thousands or millions of neurons and insert those into a brain,' said Furber.

Co-ordinating this middle level is a poorly understood 'neural language', which governs how populations of neurons communicate information to each other.

'There are many hypotheses around how that happens, from fairly basic to quite sophisticated ways that populations collaborate to communicate information,' added Furber.

'But we don't know what the characteristic firing patterns are when you think of your grandmother, for example, how those thoughts are conveyed in terms of neurons firing.'

SpiNNaker aims to build a general-purpose computer platform on which researchers can test hypotheses of how this language might work. 'We intend to support the building of larger-scale systems of neurons than has been possible to date, then look to our colleagues in neuroscience or psychology for hypotheses to use in our model and see how well it supports the evidence,' said Furber.

Though neurons are complex, he added, much of that complexity has to do with biological functions unrelated to the way they contribute to information processing. The machine will be designed to achieve a level of abstraction sufficient to capture the information processing without losing functionality.

The key to the platform is a bespoke chip design the team is developing alongside processor designer ARM, which has 16 to 20 ARM cores. On-chip technology designed by Manchester spin-out Silistix will interconnect them. Thales will become involved at the application level.

'Neurons inside our heads communicate principally by transmitting spikes, which are electrical impulses,' said Furber. 'We take in the electrical impulse as an event in the system and we communicate it through a packet switch network. We can't achieve the level of physical connectivity in the brain, so we use the very high-speed electronics to abstract that and use logical connections. We've built bespoke routers that send these packets to the right places.'

When SpiNNaker ends, Furber hopes the team will have a million-processor machine, user-friendly software and some key applications to demonstrate the system's capabilities. 'It will be quite a big machine — it will require 100,000 chips so it's not going to be something that fits in your PDA,' he said.

Berenice Baker

http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/309526/Brain+power.htm

[Caliga]

Is she HOTT.

[KRonn]

Well, we have Apple computers... next could be Cat computers?   

[dps]

So apparantly, in the future, we'll need litterboxes for our computers.

And they'll tear up our curtains.

[KRonn]

So apparantly, in the future, we'll need litterboxes for our computers.

And they'll tear up our curtains.

But on the plus side, our computers will take care of any mice around the house and yard. 

[Strix]

But on the plus side, our computers will take care of any mice around the house and yard.

Sounds great until you realize it will keep eating the mouse for the keyboard.

[grumbler]

I really don't understand the GOPtard tendency to latch onto the mentally retarded. First Palin, now you...

You don't need to understand it.  Just wait, and a GOPtard will latch on to you.