The emergent capabilities in artificial intelligence being...

The emergent capabilities in artificial intelligence being driven by INTEL Labs have more in common with human cognition than with conventional computer logic...
What Is Neuromorphic Computing.
The first generation of AI was rules-based and emulated classical logic to draw reasoned conclusions within a specific, narrowly defined problem domain. It was well suited to monitoring processes and improving efficiency, for example. The second, current generation is largely concerned with sensing and perception, such as using deep-learning networks to analyze the contents of a video frame.A coming next generation will extend AI into areas that correspond to human cognition, such as interpretation and autonomous adaptation. This is critical to overcoming the so-called “brittleness” of AI solutions based on neural network training and inference, which depend on literal, deterministic views of events that lack context and commonsense understanding. Next-generation AI must be able to address novel situations and abstraction to automate ordinary human activities.Intel Labs is driving computer-science research that contributes to this third generation of AI. Key focus areas include neuromorphic computing, which is concerned with emulating the neural structure and operation of the human brain, as well as probabilistic computing, which creates algorithmic approaches to dealing with the uncertainty, ambiguity, and contradiction in the natural world.

Neuromorphic Computing Research Focus.
The key challenges in neuromorphic research are matching a human's flexibility, and ability to learn from unstructured stimuli with the energy efficiency of the human brain. The computational building blocks within neuromorphic computing systems are logically analogous to neurons. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are a novel model for arranging those elements to emulate natural neural networks that exist in biological brains.Each “neuron” in the SNN can fire independently of the others, and doing so, it sends pulsed signals to other neurons in the network that directly change the electrical states of those neurons. By encoding information within the signals themselves and their timing, SNNs simulate natural learning processes by dynamically remapping the synapses between artificial neurons in response to stimuli.