Title: Building Brain
Speaker:
Steve Furber
Abstract:
When his concept of the universal computing machine finally became an engineering reality, Alan Turing speculated on the prospects for such machines to emulate human thinking. Although computers now routinely perform impressive feats of logic and analysis such as searching the vast complexities of the global internet for information in a second or two, they have progressed much more slowly than Turing anticipated towards achieving normal human levels of intelligent behaviour, or perhaps “common sense”. Why is this?
Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the principles of information processing in the brain are still far from understood. But progress in computer technology means that we can now realistically contemplate building computer models of the brain that can be used to probe these principles much more readily than is feasible, or ethical, with a living biological brain.
Speaker’s bio:
Steve Furber CBE FRS FREng is the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He received his B.A. degree in Mathematics in 1974 and his Ph.D. in Aerodynamics in 1980 from the University of Cambridge, England. From 1980 to 1990 he worked in the hardware development group within the R&D department at Acorn Computer Ltd, and was a principal designer both of the BBC Microcomputer, which introduced computing into most UK schools, and of the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, which today powers much of the world’s mobile consumer electronics including mobile phones and tablet computers.
At Manchester he leads research into many-core computing, particularly as applied to the problem of supporting computer models of large-scale brain subsystems. His vision is both to accelerate understanding of how the brain processes information, and to use that understanding to engineer more effective computer systems.
Steve is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Computer Society, the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the IEEE, and a member of Academia Europaea. His awards include a Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, the IET Faraday Medal, a CBE, and an Honorary DSc from the University of Edinburgh. He was a Laureate for the 2010 Millenium Technology Prize awarded by the Technology Academy of Finland, and was made a Fellow Award honoree of the Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA) in 2012.