Dharmendra S. Modha

22 years ago, on July 16, 2004, I founded Brain-inspired Computing at IBM Research, IBM. With more than $225M of funding since 2008 from United States Department of War, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, and Air Force Research Laboratory, we pioneered AI inference at the frontier of time, space, and energy by uncovering new principles of computer architecture beyond von Neumann.

My colleagues and I created three first-time-right silicon chips (Golden Gate, TrueNorth, and NorthPole). TrueNorth and NorthPole were both published in Science Magazine and have been inducted into the Computer History Museum. En route came TrueNorth’s commendation by President Obama, ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize, the Misha Mahowald Prize, R&D Magazine’s Scientist of the Year, several best paper awards, seven magazine covers, and Distinguished Alumni honors from UCSD ECE and IIT Bombay. Fun fact: our map of the wiring diagram of the macaque brain was used as the logo for IBM’s 100th Anniversary celebration event.

My deepest gratitude to everyone who made sustained, focused innovation over the long arc of time possible, especially IBM, United States Department of War, visionary program managers, my team, my collaborators, my mentors, and my alma maters (IIT Bombay and UC San Diego).

The video in the LinkedIn post takes you to the Brain-inspired Computing lab.