IBM and its collaborators -- Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center, and University of California-Merced -- have been awarded $4.9 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the first phase of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative.

According to IDC, digital data is growing 60 percent each year, giving businesses access to incredible new streams of information. But without the ability to monitor, analyze and react to this information in real time, most of its value may be lost. Until the data is captured and analyzed, decisions or actions may be delayed.

Cognitive computing offers the promise of systems that can integrate and analyze vast amounts of data from many sources in the blink of an eye, allowing businesses or individuals to make rapid decisions in time to have a significant impact.

Artificial Intelligence in Action

"Exploratory research is in the fabric of IBM's DNA," said Josephine Cheng, an IBM fellow and vice president of IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. "We believe that our cognitive-computing initiative will help shape the future of computing in a significant way, bringing to bear new technologies that we haven't even begun to imagine. The initiative underscores IBM's capabilities in bold, exploratory research and interest in powerful collaborations to understand the way the world works."

Big Blue offers some examples of cognitive-computing benefits. Bankers, for instance, have to make split-second decisions based on constantly changing data that flows at a fast pace. And monitoring the world's water supply requires a network of sensors and actuators constantly recording and reporting metrics such as temperature, pressure, wave height, acoustics and ocean tide. In both cases, making sense of the input would be a difficult task for one person, or even 100.

IBM said a cognitive computer, acting as a "global brain," could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of these complex puzzles and help people make good decisions rapidly. (continued...)

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