I do recall mate
A bit of reading from back in those days!!!
cheers Rise
Have a great weekend Chippers
Aussie investors back company that promises 'human' artificial intelligence
Timna JacksHealth Reporter
Apr 7, 2015 – 12.15am
Save
Share
Former mining stock Aziana Limited has whet Australian investors' appetite for science fiction, with its share price jumping 125 per cent since it announced it was acquiring a US-based tech company called BrainChip, which promises artificial intelligence through a microchip that replicates the neural system of the human brain.
Shares in the company closed at 9¢ before the Easter long weekend, having been priced at just 4¢ when the backdoor listing of BrainChip was announced to the market on March 18.
Creator of the patented digital chip, Peter Van Der Made told
The Australian Financial Review the technology has the capacity to learn autonomously, due to its composition of 10,000 biomimic neurons, which, through a process known as synaptic time-dependent plasticity, can form memories and associations in the same way as a biological brain. He said it works 5000 times faster and uses a thousandth of the power of the fastest computers available today.
Peter Van Der Made says his technology could create a computer with a "human" brain.
Mr Van Der Made said the technology - technically known as a Spiking Neuron Adaptive Processor (SNAP) - would have myriad commercial uses, with an early lucrative option likely to be in smartphones, within 12 months.
"Smartphones are a very big focus. BrainChip's technology can recognise your voice, so you could unlock the phone by talking to it, which means you could use it as a security device to control not just your smartphone, but other devices too. We're also thinking about things like facial recognition," he said.
The chip has endless potential applications, including driverless cars, implantable prostheses, drones, forecasting and insurance risk analysis. It could also theoretically give sight to blind people with an artificial retina; inject "life-like character" in avatars in computer games; serve as an intelligence sensor and safety device for aircraft and cars, and a security solution for the so-called Internet of Things, Mr Van Der Made said.
Mr Van Der Made is inviting technology partners to license the technology for their own chips and products, and is donating the technology to university laboratories in the US for research.
The Netherlands-born Australian, now based in southern California, was inspired to create the brain-like chip in 2004, after working at the IBM Internet Security Systems for two years, where he was chief scientist for behaviour analysis security systems. He previously invented and sold a computer immune system to the company.
He said he recognised a need for a computer to recognise and interpret information at a level of sophistication beyond its mathematical programming.
"A computer is good at storing data, but it is poor at recognising things," he said.
"I saw the need to build something that works like a brain, something that can recognise the world ... if we don't recognise someone we talk to, or something we can see, we instantly learn. No super computer can do that."
He first set out to create a fast parallel processor, before realising it would be too slow to perform the brain chip's functions. By 2007, he had worked out a new design based on the human brain and had a patent for the technology by 2008 in Australia and the US.
Within 20 years, he said the chip could be expanded to make an artificial human brain that is three times the size, and 2000 times faster than the human biological brain. Scientists could use multiple chips to create larger "brains", of up to several millions of neurons.
"That's the capability of the technology," he said.
"The human brain consists of 88 billion neurons; currently we are talking about 10,000 neurons ... the capacity is very much like an animal. So it doesn't come close to human intelligence. Not yet."
Gain insights into the week’s biggest tech stories, deals and trends.