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

[Bryan Tripp]

Hi everyone,

This is just a reminder about the seminar tomorrow, 11:00 in PAS 2464.

Regards,
Bryan

On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 10:33 PM, Bryan Tripp <bptripp at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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