Brain-Powered Silicon Chips Research Secures Funding

A team of Australian researchers developing new technology that could see silicon chips powered by human brain cells have been awarded a grant to further their research.

The research program, partnered with start-up Cortical Labs and based at Monash University in Melbourne, received just over $400 000 in government funding from the National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Program to further their project, entitled “DishBrain”.

The government grant will allow the team to develop enhanced AI machines and scale up their hardware for better future results.

DishBrain aims to take a step closer to biological computing by growing 800 000 human brain cells onto silicon chips in a controlled lab setting, project lead Adeel Razi explained in a statement released last Friday, 21 July.

Razi elaborated: “The outcomes … would have significant implications across multiple fields such as, but not limited to, planning, robotics, advanced automation, brain-machine interfaces and drug discovery.”

Computers powered by human brain cells could hold huge potential in that they could continuously learn and adapt, while retaining learned knowledge – a leapfrog over standard inorganic processors and current machine-learning, which suffers from “catastrophic forgetting”.

Researchers have long been interested in combining the plasticity and adaptability of the human brain with the processing capabilities of silicon chips, to merge the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology, and essentially fuse the best of both worlds.