IBM Unveils Chip Prototypes That Mimic Human Brain

IBM researchers have created prototype computing chips that mirror the human brain, enabling them to not only collect and analyze information, but essentially learn from their mistakes, understand the data they're seeing and react accordingly.

The "cognitive computing" chips are able to recognize patterns and make predictions based on data, learn

through experiences, find correlations among the information and remember outcomes, according to IBM officials.

The chips represent a significant departure from how computers are traditionally programmed and operated, and open opportunities in a wide range of fields, they said.

"Future applications of computing will increasingly demand functionality that is not efficiently delivered by the traditional architecture," Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research, said in a statement. "These chips are another significant step in the evolution of computers from calculators to learning systems, signaling the beginning of a new generation of computers and their applications in business, science and government."

IBM has been pushing efforts to drive more intelligence into an increasingly wider range of devices, and to create ways to more quickly and intelligently collect, analyze, process and respond to data. Those efforts were on public display in January when IBM's "Watson" supercomputer beat human contestants on the game show "Jeopardy."

Watson, like many projects at IBM Research Labs, is focused on analytics, or the ability to process and analyze data to arrive at the most optimal decision. Watson was a revelation because of its ability to think in a humanlike fashion and answer questions posed in natural language—with puns, riddles and nuances, etc.—by quickly running through its vast database of information, making the necessary connections and returning not with a list of possible correct answers, but the correct answer itself.

The cognitive computing chips echo those efforts. IBM officials are calling the prototypes the company's first neurosynaptic computing chips, which they said work in a fashion similar to the brain's neurons and synapses. It's done through advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry, they said.

It's through this mimicking of the brain's functionality that the chips are expected to understand, learn, predict and find correlations, according to IBM. Digital silicon circuits create what IBM is calling the chips' neurosynaptic cores, which include integrated memory (replicating synapses), computation (replicating neurons) and communication (replicating axons).

With those capabilities, computing can move away from the current if-then programming scenario and toward one where computers dynamically react, learn and problem-solve on the go.

The two working prototypes offer 45-nanometer SOI-CMOS cores that contain 256 neurons. One core contains 262,144 programmable synapses while the other holds 65,536 learning synapses. The chips are undergoing testing and have worked with simple applications such as navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, associative memory and classification.

The effort is getting $21 million in new funding through DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) for phase 2 of what IBM is calling the SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) project. The project's goal is to create a computing system that not only collects and analyzes complex information gathered simultaneously from multiple sensors, but can dynamically rewire itself as it goes, and to do this in a compact, energy-efficient form factor.

IBM officials see countless applications for cognitive computing systems. In one, such a system that is used to monitor the world's water supply—collecting and analyzing such data as temperature, pressure, wave height, acoustics and ocean tides—could determine the threat of a tsunami and decide to issue a warning based on its findings. Another cognitive system could monitor sights, smells, texture and temperatures to warn grocers of bad or contaminated produce.

"Imagine traffic lights that can integrate sights, sounds and smells and flag unsafe intersections before disaster happens or imagine cognitive coprocessors that turn servers, laptops, tablets and phones into machines that can interact better with their environments," IBM's Modha said. 

Old worm won't die after 2008 attack on military

Three years after what the Pentagon called the most significant breach of U.S. military networks ever, new versions of the malware blamed for the attack are still roiling U.S. networks, Reuters has learned.The malware at issue, known as "agent.btz," in 2008 infiltrated the computer systems of U.S. Central Command, which was running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The attack established what Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn called "a digital beachhead" for a foreign intelligence agency to attempt to

steal data. The Pentagon last year disclosed its operation to counter that attack, known as Buckshot Yankee. But new, more potent variations of agent.btz are still appearing. "We can definitely say that it's not limited to government computers, it never has been, and that it hasn't gone away," said an official of the Department of Homeland Security, which leads U.S. efforts to secure federal nonmilitary computer networks, often described as the Internet's "dot.gov" domain. "It's very persistent and it keeps evolving," the official said. "You're constantly seeing new, better versions of it. So it's a challenge to keep ahead of it." "It's quite prolific," the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity. The official did not specify precisely which networks have been affected or the extent of the damage. FOREIGN SPY AGENCY U.S. officials have said a foreign spy agency was responsible for the 2008 attack, which occurred when an infected flash drive was inserted into a U.S. military laptop at a base in the Middle East. But they have never publicly named which one. Reuters has learned that experts inside and outside of the U.S. government strongly suspect that the original attack was crafted by Russian intelligence. Information about the origin of the suspected attackers, however, is still closely held and Pentagon officials refuse to discuss it. People familiar with the matter spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity and did not explain why Russia was the top suspect. Buckshot Yankee led to Defense Secretary Robert Gates' order in June 2009 to create the military's new Cyber Command, which became operational last year. "That code spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control," Lynn wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs last fall. "It was a network administrator's worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary," he said.

EVADES ANTI-VIRUS DEFENSES

Anup Ghosh, a former senior computer scientist at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), said agent.btz was configured in a way that made it likely to remain a threat. It reaches out to download new code, enabling it to change its "signature" continuously and evade anti-virus software running on host networks, said Ghosh, who worked on securing military systems while at Darpa from 2002 to 2006 and now heads Invincea, a cybersecurity software company. "Old worms never die," he said. "They simply re-morph and rear their head again." Michael McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence from 2007 to 2009, indicated on Thursday night that he considered Russia's cyber espionage capabilities as outpacing China's. China is "literally taking terabytes of data," McConnell said during a panel discussion in New York about cyber threats moderated by Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen Adler. But "there are other nation-states that are better, so when they take things they're not observed as frequently," McConnell said. Pressed on whether he was referring to Russia, McConnell nodded yes. McConnell, in an interview after the session, said he knew who was behind the 2008 attack on Central Command but it was a classified matter that he would not discuss publicly. "What's been said can be said," McConnell said. Could the code have been written in a third country in an effort to mask the attack mastermind's digital fingerprints? So thinks Jeffrey Carr, author of the book Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld and a consultant to the U.S. and allied governments on Russian and Chinese cyber strategy and tactics as well as emerging threats. "The agent.btz sample that I've seen has indicators that it was created in China, which doesn't exclude Russia," he said by email. "In fact, if I were a Russian hacker running that 2008 operation against USCENTCOM, I'd purposefully use malware that was developed in China, Korea or elsewhere."