IBM is building a cognitive computing research center with the University of Illinois
IBM is forming a new cognitive computing research center in partnership with the University of Illinois.
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Big Blue said Friday the planned Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR) will be housed within the College of Engineering on the University of Illinois Urbana campus.
Set to open this summer, C3SR will work to build integrated cognitive computing systems modeled on IBM's Watson technology. The systems will ingest reams of data pertaining to college curriculum, including videos, lecture notes, homework, and textbooks. After reasoning through the vast datasets, the systems will eventually attempt to pass a college level exam.
The goal is essentially to optimize a cognitive computing system to make it perform orders of magnitude better than current systems running cognitive applications, IBM said.
"IBM's collaboration with the University of Illinois will help our researchers to extend the boundaries of cognitive computing andWatson even further," said Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President and Director, IBM Research. "The cognitive era of computing is going to be marked by a full range of disciplines coming together, advancing in parallel to help solve the world's most challenging problems."
All of C3SR's research will be conducted on IBM OpenPOWER technology, and any hardware designs and cognitive algorithms will be released to the open source community.
C3SR will be led by Professor Wen-Mei Hwu, a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois, and supported by graduate students, software engineers and IBM scientists from the IBM Systems Group.
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