University of Manchester psychologists and computer scientists are working together to use a powerful super computer to mimic the speech and language functions in the brain to better understand what goes wrong after brain damage caused by trauma or a stroke.
Building a speech and language model on a computer system 1,000 times more powerful than the average PC will enable the team to complete highly complex functions like those performed by the human brain.
“The human brain contains about one hundred billion nerve cells or neurons that each have to make a simple decision as to whether to ‘fire’ or not,” said Professor Steve Furber, in the School of Computer Science.
“Each neuron’s decision is based on how many other connecting neurons have fired recently. When this simple computation is distributed over billions of neurons, it is capable of supporting all the highly complex behavioural characteristics exhibited by humans.
“The Brain Box computer is being built using simple microprocessors that are designed to interact like the networks of neurons in the brain allowing it to replicate sophisticated functions such as speech.”
Brain box
Once the machine is fully operational, the team will use it to build a model of natural human English, capable of reading, comprehending, speaking and repeating basic words.
This £940K, five-year project, dubbed ‘Chatter Box’, is part of the £1 million ‘Brain Box’ venture that aims to build this new breed of computer based on biological principles.
The Chatter Box study has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council under the Cognitive Foresight Programme.
Visit the University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science here.
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Date Published: June 13, 2008
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