IBM has received a grant for a research project known as SYNAPSE, which stands for “Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics”, from DARPA. The goal of the project accordig to DARPA is to create intelligent machines, which will have the capability of analysing vast amount of data in a very short duration, and improve military’s decision making ability for a particular situation.

Current machine computation, though millions of times faster than biological human processing, is extremely inefficient in comparison to human thinking architecture. The project aims to narrow this gap and give machines ability to make more autonomous decisions, by coming up with a different working mechanism. It will obviously require many disciplines come together, such as computational neuroscience, artificial neural networks, information and cognitive science etc…

The key areas to be worked on include:

Artificial replication of human information processing techniques,
Support biological thinking structure such as connectivity, hierarchical organisation, competitive self organization,
Large scale digital simulation of created systems to confirm functionality,
Evolving environments for evaluation of various aspects of intelligence, such as perception, cognition and response.
This project looks like the continuation of another IBM project that started a while ago, to replicate human brain. For that article, click here.

It really looks like the robot revolution is coming close isn’t it? Let’s wait and see if this huge project will be able to discover at least some secrets that our brains hold. All laws in science are actually simple but elegant. It must be the same case for the working mechanism of our brains. Probably all we are trying to understand is how beautiful that simple working mechanism is…

For the original article, clickhere.

  darpa, ibm