Dharmendra S. Modha
Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha is an IBM Fellow and IBM Chief Scientist for Brain-inspired Computers. He is a cognitive computing pioneer who envisioned and now leads a successful effort to develop brain-inspired computers. The groundbreaking project, SyNAPSE, is funded with $53.5 million from DARPA, is multidisciplinary, multinational and multi-institutional and has had worldwide scientific impact. Its resulting revolutionary computing architecture and ecosystem break from the prevailing von Neumann paradigm and constitute a foundation for new classes of ultra-low-power, compact, real-time, multi-modal sensorimotor information technology systems. Dr. Modha also has made significant contributions to IBM businesses with innovations in caching mechanisms for storage controllers, clustering algorithms for services and coding theory for disk drives. His work has been featured in The Economist, Science, The New York Times, BBC, Discover, MIT Technology Report, Associated Press, Popular Mechanics, Communications of the ACM, Forbes, Fortune, IEEE Spectrum and many others. Author of more than 60 papers and holder of more than 100 patents, Dr. Modha has won ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize, the USENIX/FAST Test of Time Award, best paper awards at ASYNC and IDEMI, first place in the Science/NSF International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, and the IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award. He also is a Fellow of IEEE and the World Technology Network. In 2013 and 2014, he was named Best of IBM. On its 40th Anniversary, EE Times named Dr. Modha one of 10 Electronics Visionaries to Watch. Dr. Modha received his BTech from IIT Bombay in 1990 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1995.