Several biologically inspired paths are being explored by computer scientists in universities and corporate laboratories worldwide. But researchers from I.B.M. and four universities — Cornell, Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California, Merced — are engaged in a project that seems particularly intriguing.
The project, a collaboration of computer scientists and neuroscientists begun three years ago, has been encouraging enough that in August it won a $21 million round of government financing from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, bringing the total to $41 million in three rounds. In recent months, the team has developed prototype “neurosynaptic” microprocessors, or chips that operate more like neurons and synapses than like conventional semiconductors.
Neil Movold on 29 May 12Somewhere around the early 1990s, MRIs-the technique of magnetic resonance imaging-tiptoed out of the pall of cancer wards into the sunnier campuses of universities, and forged a melange among the departments of psychology, neuroscience, management and economics. The result of this academic straddle is a literary niche called pop neuroscience, into which science writer Jonah Lehrer's newest offering, Imagine: How Creativity Works, neatly slots itself.