Inside the minds of the thinking computers

[ganeshbala]

Inside the minds of the thinking computers



What if your computer had a brain, one that worked like our very own grey matter?

It sounds like science fiction, but with incredible advancements in the fields of neuroscience, nanotechnology and supercomputing technology, the time is right for computer scientists to begin trying to create computers that are able to approach the brain's abilities.

So what would that mean for tomorrow's computers? It's a tantalising question that scientists working in the field of cognitive computing are striving to answer. And, if they're successful in their goal of ousting silicon from the PC and inserting a brain, we could witness a revolution in computing power and potential. Tomorrow's computers may be able to think rather than just follow programs.

All the data in the world

Thought would give computers the power to analyse huge amounts of data in the blink of an eye. Just think for a moment about the amount of data generated by the supermarket chain Tesco, for example. It has 3,956 stores worldwide and employs 440,000 people. So, just keeping track of its staff is likely to require a pretty impressive IT system. Now add in details about all the products it sells, like prices and individual stock levels. To put this in context, Tesco managed £37.9billion worth of sales in the UK alone in 2008. That means a lot of beans, bread and bacon are flowing in and out of its doors at any given moment.

Now, run your finger down a list of FTSE companies, and think about those businesses and how much data they're likely to create – banks embroiled in the torrid financial markets, water companies monitoring rainfall and consumption, bakers, miners, car dealers and all the rest. All of them are buying, selling and doing deals. Suddenly it becomes apparent that the world is spewing out data at a truly frightening rate. According to the analyst firm IDC, the amount of digital data is growing at a mind-boggling 60 per cent each year.

The problem is that data remains merely data until it is analysed. Only then does it become information. But with so much data being generated, even the greatest minds equipped with machines groaning with Intel Core i7 chips would struggle. However, IBM believes that we need just one computer to make sense of this data maelstrom. That machine will have a brain like ours, and be able to see previously invisible patterns, links and possibilities in this boiling sea of data.

The global brain project

The company believes that a cognitive computer acting as a global brain could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of this complex puzzle and help people make good decisions rapidly. While this seems like the stuff of science fiction, it's not. It's real. A statement from IBM reads: "In an unprecedented undertaking, IBM Research and five leading universities are partnering to create computing systems that are expected to simulate and emulate the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition while rivalling its low power consumption and compact size."

The main idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain.

"The mind has an uncanny ability to integrate information from a variety of sensors, such as sight, hearing, touch and smell, and can create categories of time, space and interrelationships effortlessly," says Dharmendra Modha, the IBM scientist who is heading the initiative. "There are no computers that can even remotely approach the remarkable feats that the mind performs."

To help IBM and its collaborators along, the team has received $4.8million in funding from America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

If the team is successful, they could bring about entirely new cognitive systems, computing architectures, programming paradigms and numerous practical applications. Not short on ambition, the team has set itself an end goal – ubiquitous deployment: "Computers imbued with a new intelligence that can integrate information from a variety of sensors and sources, deal with ambiguity, respond in a context-dependent way, learn over time and carry out pattern recognition to solve difficult problems based on perception, action and cognition in complex, real-world environments."

"Exploratory research is in the fabric of IBM's DNA," said Josephine Cheng, Vice President of IBM's Almaden Research Centre in San Jose. "We believe that our cognitive computing initiative will help shape the future of computing in a significant way, bringing to bear new technologies that we haven't even begun to imagine yet."


Source : techtradar

[ganeshbala]

Mapping the brain

Before building its brain-based computer, IBM will have to understand, document, detail and map the workings of a brain. However, IBM is by no means the only company carrying out this research. In laboratories around the world, groups of computer experts and scientists are attempting to map the brain's workings in order to create this incredible new breed of thinking computers.

The most notable study – the Brain Atlas project – seeks to map the human brain, and it's occurring at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Paul Allen, the elder statesman of computing who partnered with Bill Gates at an early age to start Microsoft, has provided most of the funding. Allen was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease in 1983, and he has worked as a philanthropist for the past several decades, with a decided interest in neuroscience.

The Brain Atlas project is amazingly ambitious, and not just because it seeks to create a complete data model of the genes at work in the human brain. The project also intends to make this brain atlas widely available and accessible over the Internet; to make it a kind of social network for scientists and researchers who, working together, can make scientific discoveries in ways that would not be possible if the Brain Atlas existed only in a closed lab.

The initial step was mapping the brain of a mouse. Using complex imaging techniques, the Allen Institute took over one million high-resolution scans for about 20,000 genes of the mouse brain, capturing the gene expression inside the brain. Next, they created ways for the research scientists to view and use the data. Currently, the institute has used 150 CPUs – each with 8GB of RAM – for the mouse brain project. The human brain is 2,000 times larger than the mouse brain, so if the Brain Atlas project scaled with hardware, it would require 10 terabytes of storage. The institute plans to use software and less memory per gene expression to make smaller scans so that they can be more easily distributed over the Internet.

"The bulk of our architecture is in storage, with 600 terabytes of data currently for the mouse project," says Chinh Dang, the Technology Director. "Each 2 x 3cm slide of a human brain, which is roughly 1/65,000 of the total brain, generates an image that ranges from 1GB to 2GB, and we will acquire and process millions of these images."

What's in a picture?

The other challenge with brain map imagery is that a single picture does not show the whole story. The brain has millions of overlapping fibres that exist within the same space, and every individual fibre has an important function inside the brain – for example, holding memory, providing pain response or solving a problem. In the past, brain scientists have surmised that the brain has specific sections, but the Massachusetts General Hospital research shows that the fibres overlap and pass information between sections.

"We are constructing images that show the fibre pathways of the brain," Wedeen explains. But things aren't quite as simple as they might sound. "It's an unusual data set because the pathways overlap three-dimensionally," he adds. "They are not even remotely visible all at once."

Wedeen says that the missing pieces of the puzzle – the reason brain mapping is still a new concept and not widely used outside of a research lab – has to do with graphics processing. The map is drawn by capturing the data from the brain, assembling the data and reading the fibre data. A program called TrackVis reads the MRI data and creates the brain maps. The construction can take a few minutes or several hours, depending on the complexity of the data and how it will be used.

In the future, GPUs will do even more: "Significant bottlenecks will be improved by moving to GPUs," says Wedeen. GPUs that would otherwise be sitting around unused will be harnessed toward the more mundane tasks of computing real data. "The other big issue is storing multi-gigabyte data sets in memory and accessing them randomly and rapidly. But medical imagery can parallelise easily on GPUs at a low cost."

Reading data from more than one brain is the next phase of the project – comparing two brains or even 10 simultaneously. One issue is that current displays are not capable of showing all of the detail of a 3D map of several brains – there are just not enough pixels. Today, 30in screens at a 2,400 x1,600 resolution are just not sufficient because they do not show all of the 3D relationships. So what's the Nirvana state? A 3 x 6K monitor would provide the best data visualisation for brain mapping.

Other benefits

The benefits of all this work could be manifold. If the IBM-led team were to fail in their lofty aspirations, the ripple effects created by the research is still likely to benefit all of us. Huge amounts of conventional computing power will be needed to understand and map the brain. This can only help our collective understanding of techniques such as parallelism and data visualisation.

And there's the more human benefits, too. The results of brain-mapping projects will transform the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as MS and Alzheimer's disease, and could assist doctors to evaluate schizophrenics and those with serious drug addictions.

[aswinnandha]

it  sounds like science fiction, but with incredible advancements in the fields of neuroscience, nanotechnology and supercomputing technology that scientist create comuper have brain capability it has core i7 chips used on it the computer is like brain activity