[CTN] CTN seminar: Steve Furber, 11am August 26, PAS 2464

[Bryan Tripp]

Hi everyone,

We will start the seminar series a little early this year. Steve Furber
will be in the area next week and has agreed to give a talk on SpiNNaker.

Please note this will be in the morning rather than the usual time.

Regards,
Bryan


Title: The SpiNNaker project

Abstract:
Just two years after the world's first stored program ran its first program
at Manchester in
1948, Alan Turing published his seminal paper on "Computing Machinery and
Intelligence".
The paper opens with the words: I propose to consider the question, "Can
machines think?".
Turing then goes on to explore this question thought what he calls "The
Imitation Game", but
which subsequent generations simply call "The Turing Test".

Despite spectacular progress in the performance and efficiency of machines
since Turing's
time, we have yet to see any convincing demonstration of a machine that can
pass his test.
This would have surprised Turing - he believed that all that would be
required was more
memory. Although cognitive systems are beginning to display impressive
environmental
awareness, they do not come close to the sort of "thinking" that Turing had
in mind.

My take on the problems with true artificial intelligence are that we still
really haven't worked
out what natural intelligence is. Until we do, all discussion of machine
intelligence and
"the singularity" are specious. Based on this view, we need to return to
the source of
natural intelligence, the human brain. The SpiNNaker project has been 15
years in conception
and 8 years in construction, but is now ready to contribute to the growing
global community
(exemplified by the EU Human Brain Project) that is aiming to deploy the
vast computing
resources now available to us to accelerate our understanding of the brain,
with the ultimate
goal of understanding the information processing principles at work in
natural intelligence.

Bio:
Steve Furber CBE FRS FREng is ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the
School
of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. After completing a
BA in mathematics
and a PhD in aerodynamics at the University of Cambridge, UK, he spent the
1980s at Acorn
Computers, where he was a principal designer of the BBC Microcomputer and
the ARM
32-bit RISC microprocessor. Over 60 billion variants of the ARM processor
have since been
manufactured, powering much of the world's mobile and embedded computing.
He moved
to the ICL Chair at Manchester in 1990 where he leads research into
asynchronous and
low-power systems and, more recently, neural systems engineering, where the
SpiNNaker
project is delivering a computer incorporating a million ARM processors
optimised for brain
modelling applications.
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