IBM gets $16 million to bolster its brain-on-a-chip technology

IBM this week got $16.1 million to kick up its part of a aimed at rapidly and efficiently put brain-like senses into actual and software so that computers can process and understand data more rapidly.

IBM has now gotten $21 million to work on the program known as Systems of adaptive plastic scalable electronics (SyNAPSE) which includes researchers from HRL Laboratories, which got $16.2 million in Oct. 2008, and others such as HP.

According to DARPA, the SyNAPSE program will create useful, intelligent machines. In DARPA language: the agency is looking to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that is scalable to biological levels. The goal is to develop systems capable of analyzing vast amounts of data from many sources in the blink of an eye, letting the military or make rapid decisions in time to have a significant impact on a given problem or situation.

According to DARPA, programmable machines are limited not only by their computational capacity, but also by an architecture requiring (human-derived) algorithms to both describe and process information from their environment. In contrast, biological neural systems such as human brains, autonomously process information in complex environments by automatically learning relevant and probabilistically stable features and associations, DARPA stated.