Thursday, May 13, 2004

12:00 noon

Location: BioX/Clark Center, Room S360, 318 Campus Drive, Stanford University

Title: "The Ersatz Brain Project: Brain-Like Computer Design for Cognitive Applications"

James Anderson

Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences

Brown University

Abstact:

The Ersatz Brain Project is an attempt to design a suitable computer for the efficient execution of the software now being developed that will display human-like cognitive abilities. Examples of these software applications would be natural language understanding, text processing, conceptually based internet search, natural human-computer interfaces, cognitively based data mining, sensor fusion, and image understanding. Requirements of the proposed software are primary in shaping our hardware design. We suggest a "cortex- power" massively parallel computer is technically feasible, requiring on the order of a million simple CPUs and a terabyte of memory for connections between CPUs. This approach might build a shoddy and second- rate cortex, but still perhaps interesting. We will discuss initial "back of the envelope" ideas about architectures and three possible very early examples of the unusual software suitable for problems that might run on such a machine: sensor fusion, simple arithmetic operations, and one kind of contextual disambiguation.

Brief Bio:

Dr. Anderson has been a member of the faculty of Brown University since September 1973. He is now Professor in the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. He was Chair of the Department from 1993 to 1998 and in 2000- 2001. Dr. Anderson has published extensively in the area of computational models for cognition and memory and computational neuroscience. Dr. Anderson is the author of numerous books and journal articles, including "Talking Nets," "Introduction to Neural Networks" and "Neurocomputing," Volumes 1 and 2, all from MIT Press. Dr. Anderson has a B.S. in physics (1962) and a Ph.D. in physiology (1967) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA (1967-1971) and Rockefeller University (1971-1973).