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. Read the entire article at: http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=16834&hed=Making+Computers+Smarter§or=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