New Center to Develop Brain-Inspired Computing.

AuthorTadjdeh, Yasmin
PositionAlgorithmic Warfare

A new center at Purdue University is aiming to develop computer algorithms that can process data as fast as the human brain can think.

The Center for Brain-Inspired Computing Enabling Autonomous Intelligence, or C-BRIC, opened its doors in January. It is made up of 18 faculty members--not all of whom are from Purdue--and around 90 students, said Kaushik Roy, the university's Edward G. Tiedemann Jr. Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of C-BRIC.

The idea of the center is to develop algorithms that are inspired by the efficiency of the brain so artificial intelligence computing can reach even faster speeds, he said in an interview with National Defense.

"AI certainly has made a huge amount of progress," he said. "But we also feel that this is sort of the tip of the iceberg. The possibilities in the future... are really enormous."

Researchers at C-BRIC envision a future when computers can sense their environments, reason based on those situations and then make decisions rapidly like humans, he said.

"It goes all the way to an end-to-end functionality, just like what the brain does," Roy said.

The organ is still largely an enigma, he said. "We know very little about the brain."

Roy compared the burgeoning research of brain-inspired algorithms to engineers first learning to build aircraft.

"When we learned to fly, it was very, very important to understand how the bird flapped its wing when it was flying," he said. "But today when we have a 747 flying halfway around the world, it doesn't flap its wings. It carries a payload of about 350 to 400 people and goes halfway around the world in probably about 15 hours or so, which no bird can."

In the same way, researchers are examining which parts of the brain should be emulated when it comes to algorithms, he said. "Should everything be brain-like?" At the moment, it is still too early to say, he noted.

The technology still has challenges to overcome, he said.

For a computer to make such decisions, it requires massive amounts of power.

"There is a need to not only develop new algorithms that are brain-like [but to also] achieve the kind of efficiency that our brain does--efficiency in terms of energy consumption and so on," he said.

Artificial intelligence programs like IBM's Watson--which once famously won a game of Jeopardy over two human contestants--or Google's AlphaGo can require hundreds of thousands of watts of power to operate, he noted. The human brain...

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