Making Computers Smarter
From: Red Herring - 05/11/2006

Scientists and researchers at IBM's annual Almaden Institute conference
agreed that computers must abandon their existing structure in favor of a
more organic model if they will ever be able to emulate human intelligence.
Rather than writing software to mimic human behavior, cognitive computing
researchers should base more of their work on neuroscience and psychology,
and the National Institute of Standards and Technology is urging academia and
industry to spend $4 billion over the next decade developing new computing
theories. "The brain isn't like a [current] computer. It's more like an
evolutionary jungle," said Gerald Edelman, a Nobel Laureate and the director
of the Neurosciences Institute. "They learn by making mistakes, just like we
do." Edelman believes the software approach to artificial intelligence is too
rigid, focusing so much on following rules that the machines cannot learn
from their errors. Meanwhile, researchers at Switzerland's Ecole
Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have used IBM and SGI
supercomputers to generate artificial neurons and synapses. Other research is
closer to the market. Robert Hecht-Nielsen, director of the confabulation
laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, demonstrated
Chancellor, a cat food dispenser powered by technology that enables it to
predict language and communicate with pet owners about buying more food. A
more distant project is developing a device that functions as a form of
neural prosthesis for patients whose hippocampus has been damaged to the
point where their cognitive or functional brain capacity are impaired. "The
hippocampus acts like a set of parallel processors," said Ted Berger of the
University of Southern California. 

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http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=16834&hed=Making+Computers+Smarter&sector=Industries&subsector=Computing

Links:
Gerald Edelman
http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1972/edelman-bio.html
http://www.scripps.edu/nb/chair.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Edelman
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/System/8870/books/Edelman.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/edelman.html
http://cajal.unizar.es/eng/part/Edelman.html

Neurosciences Institute
http://www.nsi.edu/public/index.php

EPFL
http://www.epfl.ch/index.en.html

Robert Hecht-Nielsen
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/institute/bio/2006/?hechtnielsen
http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/FacBios/findprofile.pl?fmp_recid=89

Institute for Neural Computation
http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/groups/inc/

New Confabulation Neuroscience Laboratory Opens at UC San Diego
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/hecht_nielsenlab.asp

Hal-like computer simulation rattles brain conference
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=19&entry_id=5076

Ted Berger
http://www.usc.edu/dept/engineering/neuralengineering/
http://www.usc.edu/dept/nbio/ngp/Faculty/berger-tw.shtml
