Brain Corporation
Brain Corporation is a small research company that is developing novel algorithms and microprocessors that are modeled on biological nervous systems.
The research aims to facilitate future applications in visual perception, motor control, and autonomous navigation.
The intention is to equip consumer devices, such as mobile phones and household robots, with artificial nervous systems.
The company was co-founded in 2009 by computational neuroscientist Eugene Izhikevich and neuroscientist/entrepreneur Allen Gruber. The research is partly funded by Qualcomm and the company is hosted on the Qualcomm campus in San Diego, California. The number of staff is thought to be between 10 and 20 people.
UPDATE: February 15, 2012 - Paul Jacobs, the CEO of Qualcomm, made the following comments about Brain Corporation during at talk at San Diego State University on January 31, 2012:
"The team actually started out by building a retina and they came to me and said: 'Look, it responds to these optical illusions the same way a human does. They put another layer of cells behind that it started to find features, They put another layer, it started to find corners or oriented lines or something, another layer, it started to find patterns. Today it tracks objects. It's actually not programmed, it's taught."
Source: Digital brain in the works at Qualcomm (KPBS Public Broadcasting)
Research
The central theme of Brain Corporation's research is to build artificial brains for commercial applications.
The vision project aims to recreate the mammalian visual system in a large-scale model that faithfully reproduces the anatomy and spiking dynamics of the retina, visual cortex, inferior temporal cortex, and associated subcortical structures. This will be used to endow robots with autonomous navigation and object recognition and tracking.
The motor control project is developing spiking models of action selection, reinforcement learning, and motor control that are based on the known anatomy and physiology of mammalian cerebellum and basal ganglia. Results will give robots the ability to control their effectors and actuators to manipulate objects in real-world environments.
Large-scale brain simulations
The work at Brain Corporation builds on earlier research done by Eugene Izhikevich. While working at The Neurosciences Institute in 2005 he built a full-size simulation of the human brain. The model contained 100 billion spiking neurons and a quadrillion (10^11) synapses. It represented 300 x 300 mm of thalamo-cortical surface and nuclei. The model spontaneously exhibited alpha and gamma waves. One second of simulation took 50 days on a Beowulf cluster of 27 processors running at 3 GHz each. See the paper and videos.
Company background
Eugene Izhikevich
Eugene Izhikevich is the Brain Corporation CEO and co-founder. Originally from Russia, he holds degrees in maths from Moscow and Michigan State universities. He was a Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego from 2000 to 2009. In 2009 he co-founded Brain Corporation and now works there full time.
Details of Eugene's research and publications can be found on his website at izhikevich.org. In 2007 he published a book on the math of single neuron spiking and bursting: Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience.
In 2006 he founded Scholarpedia, an online wiki-based encyclopedia. It is currently heavily slanted towards neuroscience, although all areas of science are welcome. Interesting articles, for example, are those on neural correlates of consciousness and silicon neurons.
About Qualcomm
Qualcomm is an American global telecommunication corporation that designs, manufactures, and markets digital wireless telecommunications products and services. Among other things they produce mobile phones, mobile modems such as Gobi which is used in the iPhone 4, low-power displays, and trailer tracking devices. The company was founded in 1985, it employs 17,500 people worldwide, and is headquartered in San Diego, California.
Qualcomm Ventures was formed in the year 2000 with a $500-million fund to make strategic investments in early-stage high-technology ventures. They have invested in Brain Corporation to develop biologically-inspired neural algorithms with applications in vision, motor control, and autonomous navigation. They aim to build specialized hardware for the next generation of smart consumer products with artificial nervous systems.
Brain Corporation is not to be confused with the Japanese web and TV production company of the same name.
Address
Brain Corporation
QRC-224L
5665 Morehouse Drive
San Diego, CA, 92121
Funding
- Initial funding was received from Qualcomm Ventures in July 2009 - a multi-year agreement to develop spiking models of the visual system.
- Further funding was received from DARPA in November 2010 for the purpose of designing artificial nervous system for UAVs.
- A repeat agreement was signed with Qualcomm in September 2011. More funds were provided to hire research scientists.
Current status
Six full-time job vacancies at Brain Corporation were advertised in October 2011.
Research scientists were sought to develop biologically detailed spiking models of the mammalian visual system. There were requirements for both experimentalists and theoreticians. Tasks were: to research spike-timing dynamics of visual processing, to devise appropriate models for the functional streams of the visual system, and to test hypotheses using large-scale simulations. Candidate requirements were: knowledge of spiking networks, STDP, the visual system, and programming with Matlab, Python, and C/C++.
Videos
Eugene Izhikevich, Hermann Cuntz, and Paul Bender discuss the work of Brain Corporation.
Video published May 2011
Based on an August 2010 scientific paper by Hermann Cuntz et al:
One Rule to Grow Them All: A General Theory of Neuronal Branching and Its Practical Application
Visualisation of a large-scale model of human thalamocortical systems built by Eugene Izhikevich and Gerald Edelman in 2005.
The model simulates one million multi-compartmental spiking neurons (of 22 different types) and almost half a
billion synapses. It exhibits behaviours of normal brain activity that were not explicitly built-in but emerged spontaneously.
See the full paper (PDF).
People involved
Allen Gruber  Co-founder, board member | Botond Szatmáry   | Eugene Izhikevich Founder | ||
| Filip Ponulak Scientist | Filip Piekniewski  Scientist | Hermann Cuntz Science collaborator | ||
| Jayram Moorkanikara Scientist | Lauren Jepson PhD candidate, intern 2011 | Marius Buibas Scientist | ||
| Micha Richert Scientist | Patrick Eggen Qualcomm investment manager | Todd Hylton VP of Strategy |
Research papers
- Neuromorphic Modeling Abstractions and Simulation of Large-Scale Cortical Networks - November 2011
- Spike-Timing Theory of Working Memory - August 2010
Weblinks
- Brain Corporation homepage
- Eugene Izhikevich homepage
