IBM to Establish New Cognitive Computing Systems Research Center

IBM Research today announced that it plans to create the Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR) through a collaboration with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to be housed within the College of Engineering on the Urbana campus. 

The new center will open this summer and will provide advanced research advance in machine learning and heterogeneous computing systems optimized for new cognitive computing workloads. The C3SR will build and optimize integrated systems including the cognitive computing systems modeled on IBM's Watson technology that can master a subject area by learning from multimedia and multi-modal educational content. 

The systems will be able to ingest very large amounts of data including videos, lecture notes, homework, and textbooks, and reason through this knowledge effectively enough to be able to eventually pass a college level exam. The goal is to create optimized computing systems that will be able perform orders of magnitude better than today’s systems that run cognitive applications.

Researchers will have access to the OpenPOWER Foundation’s systems technology as well as technical development and support from IBM Systems Group. The new hardware design and cognitive algorithms will be released to the open source community through the OpenPOWER Foundation, of which both IBM and the University of Illinois are members.

University of Illinois researchers will collaborate with IBM scientists who will provide guidance and technology expertise and all of the C3SR’s research will be conducted on IBM OpenPOWER technology.

The collaboration is part of IBM’s ongoing academic initiatives that help students develop skills and understanding of cognitive computing to meet the increasing demand for high skilled technology professionals. IBM is working with more than 250 universities around the world to help teach courses in various cognitive computing disciplines.