IBM and university researchers will try to simulate and emulate the human brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, and rival its low power consumption and compact size.
"Ultimately, the team hopes to rival the brain's low power consumption and small size by using nanoscale devices for synapses and neurons," said IBM.
The collaborators have a $4.9m grant from the US military for the first phase of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative.
IBM's proposal, C2S2 (Cognitive Computing via Synaptronics and Supercomputing) outlines nine months of research into subjects it terms synaptronics, material science, neuromorphic circuitry, supercomputing simulations and virtual environments.
"Initial research will focus on demonstrating nanoscale, low power synapse-like devices and on uncovering the functional microcircuits of the brain," said IBM. "The long-term mission of C2S2 is to demonstrate low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence."
The IBM team is led by Dr Dharmendra Modha, manager of its cognitive computing initiative. The universities include Stanford, Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell, Columbia, and California-Merced.
"Recently, the IBM cognitive computing team demonstrated the near-real-time simulation at a scale of a small mammal brain using cognitive computing algorithms with the power of IBM's BlueGene supercomputer," claimed IBM. "With this simulation capability, the researchers are experimenting with various mathematical hypotheses of brain function and structure as they work toward discovering the brain's core computational micro and macro circuits."
According to IBM, in the past artificial intelligence research has focused on individual aspects of engineering intelligent machines. "Cognitive computing, on the cutting edge of this line of research, seeks to engineer holistic intelligent machines that neatly tie together all of the pieces," it said.