The Next Frontier In Computing: Your Brain
President Barack Obama is introduced by Dr. Francis Collins, Director, National Institutes of Health, at the BRAIN Initiative event in the East Room of the White House, April 2, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)
At a recent conference IBM IBM +0.65% researchers unveiled a new computer architecture in the hope of creating a computer as powerful as the human brain. Using simulations of “enormous complexity,” the researchers have created an architecture, named TrueNorth, that could lead to a new generation of machines that function more like biological brains than traditional computers.
An article on the MIT Technology Review website describes the opportunity to use the TrueNorth cognitive computing architecture writing, “to develop systems as powerful as human vision. The brain sorts through more than one terabyte of visual data each day but requires little power to do so.”
The technique was developed by researcher Dharmendra S. Modha and his team at IBM Research – Almaden in San Jose, California. Dr. Modha is the founder of IBM’s Cognitive Computing group and leads a global team focused on the intersection of neuroscience, nanoscience and supercomputing. His team is attempting to build computing systems that emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action, and cognition – all while consuming many orders of magnitudes less power and space than today’s computers. In 2009, his group received ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize for its research into cortical simulations at scale.
Yet another area of cognitive computing study is focused on the Boltzmann machine, an algorithm invented by Geoffrey Hinton and Terry Sejnowski in 1983. The Boltzmann Machine is capable of learning the underlying constraints that characterize a domain simply by being shown examples from the domain. Or in more simple terms, it can “interpret & recognize patterns” in much the same way our brain does, with or without context.
Quanta Magazine further explains the concept indicating that this approach is “particularly promising as a simple theoretical explanation of a number of brain processes, including development, memory formation, object and sound recognition, and the sleep-wake cycle.”
“The magic thing that happens is it’s able to generalize,” said Yann LeCun, director of the Center for Data Science at New York University. “If you show it a car it has never seen before, if it has some common shape or aspect to all the cars you showed it during training, it can determine it’s a car.”
Researchers aren’t alone in attempting to unlock some of the mysteries of the Brain. Earlier this year, President Obama unveiled the “BRAIN” Initiative, short for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. It is a bold new research effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind. The initiative launched with approximately $100 million in funding for research supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the President’s Fiscal Year 2014 budget.
According to the announcement on The White House Blog, “The Initiative promises to accelerate the invention of new technologies that will help researchers produce real-time pictures of complex neural circuits and visualize the rapid-fire interactions of cells that occur at the speed of thought. Such cutting-edge capabilities, applied to both simple and complex systems, will open new doors to understanding how brain function is linked to human behavior and learning, and the mechanisms of brain disease.”
In January the Human Brain Project (HBP) received $1.3 billion in funding from the European Commission. The project is the brain child of Swiss neuroscientist Henry Markram who plans to create a precise simulation of a human brain using a supercomputer. The project hopes to” develop six ICT platforms, dedicated respectively to Neuroinformatics, Brain Simulation, High Performance Computing, Medical Informatics, Neuromorphic Computing and Neurorobotics. In all cases, the platforms will build on existing capabilities, some but not all developed by the HBP partners.”
Along with these advancements, startups have also begun to enter this new computing frontier. Last week Toronto, Canada based InteraXon, creators of Muse: the brain sensing headband, announced it has raised $6 million in Series A financing from a number of prominent investors.
The company claims that its technology can “monitor the neurons in the brain, as they fire, they generate magnetic fields that can be easily read from the head using an Electroencephalograph, or EEG. The InteraXon system analyses these readings and separates the waves by frequency into alpha, beta, gamma, and theta waves, each of which is associated with a particular conscious state. After analyzing and sorting the waves by type, our software compares the amount of energy in each band and generates a control signal that correlates to the strength of a particular brain state.”
“With InteraXon’s Muse, you can merely use your brain to make things happen. By turning what seems like science fiction into reality, they’re defining an entirely new category of wearables that are thought controlled,” says Sundeep Peechu, partner at Felicis Ventures.
Combining the growing interest in wearable technology with the nearly limitless potential of the human brain is an exciting frontier. Let us know what your thoughts are on this type of technology in the comment area below.
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