IBM Plans Cognitive Computing Research Center with University of Illinois

By John Russell

April 15, 2016

In keeping with its vision of an era of cognitive computing enabled by acceleration technology, IBM Research (NYSE: IBM) today announced plans for a multi-year collaboration with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to create the Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR) which will be housed within the College of Engineering on the Urbana campus.

IBM has big ambitions for the center: “C3SR will build and optimize integrated systems such as state-of-the-art cognitive computing systems modeled on IBM’s Watson technology that can master a subject area by learning from multimedia and multi-modal educational content. Such systems will efficiently ingest vast 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.”

Many details are yet to be worked out. The level of funding and size of installation will be announced this summer when the new center formally opens, said Hillery Hunter, a project driver and the director for systems acceleration and memory at IBM Research.

Hilley Hunter, IBM Research
Hilley Hunter, IBM Research

“The University of Illinois is already working on CAPI accelerated algorithms and systems. In the context of the new center they will be moving into heavier use of NVIDIA’s NVLink between the processors and GPUs. They also will be looking to build multiple generations of hardware initially using off the shelf OpenPOWER-based systems and then custom designs for accelerating cognitive workloads,” she said.

Plans call for developing a suite of cognitive workload tools in the machine learning, deep learning, and graph analytics, according to Hunter. “As work at the center evolves they’ll be doing some things like creating new benchmarks and working closely with faculty members across the college of engineering on things like natural language processing, natural language classification, and image analytics,” said Hunter.

C3SR will be headed by Professor Wen-Mei Hwu, a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the university. Hwu sounded a buoyant note in the announcement, “The study of machine learning and natural language understanding is critical to making sense of the 2.5 billion gigabytes of data being created every single day. [The] University of Illinois team is excited to broaden this research with longtime partner IBM through this new Center, which will further elevate our understanding of the potential for cognitive computing.”

All of the C3SR’s research will be conducted on IBM OpenPOWER technology. “There is already some OpenPOWER hardware there,” said Hunter, “and work is starting through technical workshops and exchanges between IBM Research and IBM Watson.” It will be interesting to learn specifically what OpenPOWER equipment eventually forms the base infrastructure and which projects are selected first.

Hunter said C3SR’s work will span commercial and scientific domains but generally be focused on developing new algorithms in machine learning for processing different types of media and for media learning. Think of a machine teaching itself course material from massive online course (MOC) database and acting as an assistant for student. “We see broad applications not only for commercial but for broader assistive function in societal applications,” said Hunter.

Clearly, C3SR will emulate much of what IBM Watson now does. One can view the center as being initially fueled by an injection of IBM Watson technology. Hunter says the goal, though, is to expand beyond what Watson can currently do. “Systems optimization for algorithms for media and the grand challenge problems [such as] having a computer learn from a MOC is not something in our current portfolio and expands the envelope of the technology we’ve done inside,” she said. The IBM Watson offering should certainly benefit from the collaboration.

Notably, most of the algorithm development and systems optimization work will be contributed to the open source community and to the OpenPOWER Foundation, said Hunter.

In the release announcing the center, Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director, IBM Research, said, “The cognitive era of computing is going to be marked by a full range of disciplines coming together. The University of Illinois’ leadership in heterogeneous systems and learning research, its tremendous talent and longstanding relationship with IBM, make it an ideal partner for this endeavor.”

Access to the new center and its systems will be available University of Illinois faculty and others on campus working in the cognitive area, but who aren’t part of the center. “We view construction of the platform here for cognitive research as very much part of an ecosystem expansion plan,” said Hunter.

IBM says the collaboration is also part of its ongoing academic initiatives to help students develop skills and understanding of cognitive computing to meet the increasing demand for high skilled technology professionals. Certainly there’s a skill shortage in HPC. IBM worked with eight universities around the world in early development of its Watson cognitive computing system, and says it is now working with more than 250 universities around the world to help teach courses in various cognitive computing disciplines.

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