__NOTOC__ Dharmendra S. Modha is an

Indian American Indian Americans are Americans whose ancestry originates wholly or partly from India. The terms Asian Indian and East Indian are used to avoid confusion with Native Americans in the United States, Native Americans in the United States, who ar ...

manager and lead researcher of the Cognitive Computing group at

IBM Almaden Research Center IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company. IBM Research is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, near IBM headquarters ...

. He is known for his pioneering works in Artificial Intelligence and Mind Simulation. In November 2009, Modha announced at a supercomputing conference that his team had written a program that simulated a cat brain. He is the recipient of multiple honors, including the

Gordon Bell Prize The Gordon Bell Prize is an award presented by the Association for Computing Machinery each year in conjunction with the SC Conference series (formerly known as the Supercomputing Conference). The prize recognizes outstanding achievement in hig ...

, given each year to recognize outstanding achievement in

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

applications. In November 2012, Modha announced on his blog that using 96 Blue Gene/Q racks of the

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Livermore, California, United States. Originally established in 1952, the laboratory now i ...

Sequoia supercomputer (1,572,864 processor cores, 1.5 PB memory, 98,304 MPI processes, and 6,291,456 threads), a combined IBM and LBNL team achieved an unprecedented scale of 2.084 billion neurosynaptic cores containing 530 billion neurons and 137 trillion synapses running only 1542× slower than real time. In August 2014 a paper describing the

TrueNorth A cognitive computer is a computer that hardwires artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms into an integrated circuit that closely reproduces the behavior of the human brain. It generally adopts a neuromorphic engineering approach. ...

Architecture, "the first-ever production-scale 'neuromorphic' computer chip designed to work more like a mammalian brain than" a processor was published in the journal Science.

project culminated in a 64 million neuron system for running deep neural network applications.

Personal life

Modha holds a BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from

IIT Bombay The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT- Bombay or IIT-B) is a Public university, public research university and Institute of technology, technical institute in Powai, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. IIT Bombay is mainly known for the hig ...

(1990), India and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from

UCSD The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing ...

. He received his PhD at the Jacobs School of Engineering in 1995 and is now manager of Cognitive Computing at IBM's Almaden Research Center and a Master Inventor. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of AAAS, ACM, and SfN.

Achievements

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 California 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. Over the last two decades, he has founded two start-up companies, been issued 26 U.S. patents and has authored over 40 publications in international journals and conferences.

Recognition

*He 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. *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 is currently an

IBM Fellow An IBM Fellow is a position at IBM appointed by the CEO. Typically only four to nine (eleven in 2014) IBM Fellows are appointed each year, in May or June. Fellow is the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve. Over ...

. *He is currently an IBM Master Inventor.

Criticism

*The validity of the cat brain simulation project has been called into question by competing neuroscience researchers.

References

External links

Dharmendra S Modha's Cognitive Computing Blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Modha, Dharmendra American people of Indian descent American computer scientists Living people IIT Bombay alumni Scientific computing researchers Year of birth missing (living people)