News updates
February 15, 2012
Digital brain in the works at Qualcomm - Paul Jacobs, the CEO of Qualcomm, reveals an interesting update about Brain Corporation: "The team started out building a retina. They found it responded to optical illusions the same way a human does. They added another layer of cells and it started to find features. They added another layer, it started to find corners and oriented lines. Another layer, it started to find patterns. Today it tracks objects. It's not programmed, it's taught."
February 4, 2012
Artificial Brains: Not in this century - this skeptical article was published yesterday by cognitive scientist Mark Changizi. One of his arguments is that we still don't understand the tiny nervous system of the Caenorhabditis elegans roundworm. If the functioning of these 302 neurons is beyond our grasp, even after decades of study, then we've no hope of soon understanding the many billions of neurons in a mammalian brain.
January 24, 2012
Last week the BrainScaleS machine displayed its first spiking neural activity. BrainScaleS is a European research project that is building neuromorphic hardware using wafer-scale integration. One wafer is designed to simulate ~50 million synapses, or up to 200,000 neurons. The wafer, delivered to Germany from the fab in Taiwan late last year, can be seen in the photo on the right, encased behind an octagonal aluminium plate.
January 3, 2012
The proceedings of the 2nd European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition were published online today. This conference marked the half-way point in the one-year pilot phase of the
December 5, 2011
Someone claimed today that Google has developed a robot that can pass the Turing Test 93% of the time. The claim was posted anonymously to reddit.com by a supposed former Google X Lab employee. The posting is most likely a hoax, but interesting reading nevertheless. It possibly contains some elements of truth, although we don't know which elements.
November 19, 2011
Today researchers at MIT announced they have built a silicon synapse that models the ion channels in a single biological synapse. It contains ~400 transistors and operates using analog current, not digital. They plan to use the chip to investigate how biological synapses are strengthened and weakened, and to build larger systems that model neural functions such as the visual system. See the news article and the research paper.
November 16, 2011
Newly released video presention of the Human Brain Project given by project founder Henry Markram on November 2, 2011 in San Francisco. Skip to chapter 8 of the video if you're only interested in Markram's part of the talk. He also talks with neuroscientist David Eagleman about whether a brain simulation would be truly self-aware.
October 7, 2011
Scientific papers describing IBM's neurosynaptic core were published online yesterday. These cores implement 256 digital integrate-and-fire neurons and a 1024x256 bit memory for synapses. They use IBM's 45nm SOI process. The chips are anticipated to become a key building block of a modular neuromorphic architecture.
August 22, 2011
Noah Hutton published part two of his video documentary about the Blue Brain Project today. It's a nice clip and it's great to get an update on the project's progress. We meet the people involved and have a good look around their laboratory.
