TSC 2010

PLENARY  4   Machine Consciousness 

DHARMENDRA MODHA

Network Architecture of the White Matter Pathways in the Macaque Brain

Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha is manager of the Cognitive Computing group at IBM's Almaden Research Center. He chaired IBM’s 2006 Almaden Institute on Cognitive Computing, co-chaired Cognitive Computing 2007 at Berkeley, CA, and was a speaker at the Decade of the Mind Symposium in May 2007. He is the Principal Investigator for DARPA SyNAPSE proposal that brought together IBM (Almaden, Watson, Zurich, India), Stanford University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Columbia University, and University of Califronia at Merced to embark upon the ambitious quest of cognitive computing to engineer intelligent business machines by reverse-engineering the computational function of the brain and delivering it in a small, energy efficient chip.

His research has had significant practical impact on IBM's businesses. His breakthrough work on Adaptive Replacement Cache and Wise Ordering of Writes algorithms has led to dramatically improved cache management and performance for IBM's flagship enterprise-class storage controllers: DS8000 and DS6000. He invented the core algorithms underlying a text/data mining and visualization system, eClassifier, that has become a widely-used Asset for IBM Global Services. His theoretical researches influenced design of practical modulation codes for several of IBM's disk drives and tape systems. Most recently, his group performed cortical simulations at scale of cat cerebral cortex (1 billion neurons, 10 trillion synapses) only 100x slower than real-time on a 147,456 processor BlueGene/P supercomputer. This work received ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize. He is interested in cognitive computing, information theory, and machine learning.

At IBM, he has won the Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper award, an Outstanding Innovation Award, an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, and Communication Systems Best Paper Award. He holds 27 US patents, and is currently an IBM Master Inventor. He has authored over 40 publications in international journals and conferences. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of AAAS, ACM, and SfN.

Dr. Modha holds a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Mumbai and a Ph. D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UCSD.