Dharmendra Modha

Education

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Career

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. In August 2014 a paper describing the TrueNorth 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.

Modha holds a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Mumbai, India and a Ph.

Doctorate. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of California, San Diego. He received his Doctor of Philosophy at the Jacobs School of Engineering in 1995 and is now manager of Cognitive Computing at International Business Machines Corporation"s Almaden Research Center and a Master Inventor. Modha is manager of the Cognitive Computing group at International Business Machines Corporation"s Almaden Research Center.

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 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)’s Gordon Bell Prize.

He is currently an International Business Machines Corporation Fellow.

He is currently an International Business Machines Corporation Master Inventor. The validity of the cat brain simulation project has been called into question by competing neuroscience researchers.

Achievements

• Modha is manager of the Cognitive Computing group at International Business Machines Corporation"s Almaden Research Center. He chaired International Business Machines Corporation’s 2006 Almaden Institute on Cognitive Computing, co-chaired Cognitive Computing 2007 at Berkeley, California, and was a speaker at the Decade of the Mind Symposium in May 2007. He is the Principal Investigator for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency SyNAPSE proposal that brought together International Business Machines Corporation (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 United States. patents and has authored over 40 publications in international journals and conferences.

Membership

He is a Senior Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and SfN.