As part of a multi-year cognitive computing initiative funded by DARPA and involving academic collaborators, Dharmendra Modha and his colleagues at IBM Research – Almaden have designed an experimental computer chip that emulates the brain’s cognitive powers. It’s a revelation that’s got the popular press abuzz today. From the IBM press release: In a sharp departure from traditional concepts in designing and building computers, IBM’s first neurosynaptic computing chips recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems, such as the brain, through advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry. Its first two prototype chips have already been fabricated and are currently undergoing testing.   Called cognitive computers, systems built with these chips won’t be […]

Ever tried baking — yes, baking — and found it challenging? Well, try teaching it to a robot. That’s just what a group of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have done. Graduate student Mario Bollini, a member of Daniela Rus’s Distributed Robotics Lab, has spent the past several months programming the R&D platform PR2 robot developed by Willow Garage to bake cookies from scratch: While the project was originally intended as a simple introductory project, it has turned out to be quite challenging due to all of the nuances involved with programming a robot to follow a lengthy list of tasks, while also employing vision, object […]

Yesterday, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a new five-year, $18.5 million Engineering Research Center (ERC) that will pursue interdisciplinary research and education in areas of health and robotics: The NSF ERC for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (ERC/SNE) will create devices to restore or augment the body’s capabilities for sensation and movement. The foundation for the new devices will be new mathematical and structural understanding of the nervous system. Center researchers will combine this new understanding with improved communication and interface design and with advanced control and adaptation technologies.   The Center aims to create devices that function and adapt seamlessly with the body, enabling dynamic and highly complex interactions with human […]

It’s not everyday the national news media envisions computing research. But it happened on Sunday, when New York Times‘ writer John Markoff penned a story about the future of computer architecture — picking up on a paper presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2011) earlier this year that forecast a 24-fold gap from the expectations of Moore’s Law by the year 2024 and concluded, “Regardless of chip organization and topology, multicore scaling is power limited to a degree not widely appreciated by the computing community.” Markoff writes: For decades, the power of computers has grown at a staggering rate as designers have managed to squeeze ever more and ever […]

The NSF’s Science Nation has a great feature today on the “Science of Shopping,” describing how computer scientists Rajeev Sharma and Satish Mummareddy have developed cameras and software that track our shopping behavior in brick-and-mortar stores, with the goal of showing retailers and manufacturers the best areas to place products within stores. Next time you go to a store, take a minute to look at all the things that are trying to grab your attention. With so many products available and so many stores and websites, how do you decide what to buy and where to shop? Whether it’s convenience, good service or finding the best deals, store owners want […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) From today’s New York Times: A coalition of 28 American universities is throwing its weight behind a plan to build ultra-high-speed computer networks — with Internet service several hundred times faster than what is now commercially available — in the communities surrounding the participating colleges.   The project, which is named GigU and will be announced on Wednesday, is meant to draw high-tech startups in fields like health care, energy and telecommunications to the areas near the universities, many of which are in the Midwest or outside of major cities. These zones would ideally function as hubs for building […]