VOL
6, NO. 6 OCTOBER 1989
HITACHI
DEBUTS DIGITAL NEURAL NETWORK CHIP
Japanese
firm Reduces the Number of Synopses Needed for Neuron Connections Applications
in Scheduling Optimization.
Hitachi,
the Japanese electronics giant, released what it described as the world's
biggest digital neurocomputing chip. The new chip, a prototype, was devised
using LSI (large scale integration) techniques. Hitachi scientists took as
their inspiration information about the interconnection and organization of
neurons in the human brain.
The
result is a five-inch diameter LSI microchip with 576 "neurons". In
creating the chip, researchers developed a new interconnection methodology that
requires far fewer "synapses" to link the neurons to each other. The
methodology, which borrows from time-sharing techniques, enabled the use only
100 synapses to link the 576 neurons. In similar situations, as many as 10,000
synapses would be required.
Another
innovative feature of the new neural network chip is the digital (continued on
7)
PELLIONISZ,
HOPFIELD AND HNC WIN COMPUTING PRIZES
Humboldt Prize for Scientific Research from Germany, Wright Prize from Harvey Mudd
College, R&D's New Technology Award
Neurocomputing
continues to win recognition and awards for innovative technological research.
The latest examples are awards won in Europe and the United States. The 1989
Humboldt Prize for Scientific Research was awarded to Andras J. Pellionisz of
NYU Medical School. The award was made by the Bonn, West Germany based
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to Pellionisz, a professor of biophysics at
the New York City-based Medical School's department of physiology and
biophysics, in recognition of his research into tensor geometric relationships
in neural networking. The award, given "to eminent foreign academics in
recognition of achievement in research", is worth DM 50,000 (about
$30,000).
The
1989 Wright Prize for interdisciplinary study in science and engineering was
awarded to John J. Hopfield of the California Institute of Technology. He is
the Roscoe G. Dickinson Professor of Biology and Chemistry at Caltech and a
member of the technical staff at AT&T's Bell Laboratories. Hopfield is
famous for his work finding a neural network analogue to spin glasses in
physics. The so-called Hopfield net, which he described in papers published in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1982 and 1984, made the
field of neural networks better known to many scientists and engineers.
The
Wright Prize, valued at $20,000 was established by a gift to Harvey Mudd
College, of Claremont, CA, from H. Dudley Wright, a retired industrialist and a
trustee of the college. Hopfield received the money and a piece of sculpture in
a ceremony at the College in the middle of this month.
Hopfield
was a recent recipient of the Michelson-Morley Award from Case Institute of
Technology as well as two prizes from the American Physical Society. He was
awarded a "genius" prize in 1983: one of the McArthur Prize Fellowships
that consist of living expenses for five years with no required research or
reporting.
The Humboldt Prize for Scientific Research was awarded to
Pellionisz this month. This is the first international prize awarded for
research into neurocomputing. Pellionisz noted that it represented something of
an ironic, reverse brain drain: "This is a German award being given to a
Hungarian immigrant who is now an American citizen."
In
addition to the prize money, Pellionisz will have the opportunity to do research
and development work in Germany sometime in 1990. He indicated that he intends
to use the research time, assistance and prize money in order to create a
hardware prototype of his tensor paradigm of neural geometry that he has been
working on throughout his professional career. Pellionisz was a recent
candidate in the election for next year's president of the International Neural
Network Society (INNS).
Pellionisz'
tensor network theory has been elucidated in scores of papers he has published.
A rather thorough description of some of his latest work can be found in his
contribution to this year's International Joint Conference on Neural Networks
(Proceedings: IJCNN '89; Volume I, pp. 711-715). Another description of his
work can be found in Patricia Churchland's book, Neurophilosophy (Bradford
Books/MIT Press, 1986).
Pellionisz
learned he had won the Humboldt Prize just prior to attending this year's l9th
annual meeting of the Society For Neuroscience in Phoenix, AZ, where he was one
of the featured speakers who spoke on neural network research.
Besides
Pellionisz, other neural net talks at the neuroscience meeting were given by
Caltech's Christof Koch (a candidate for vice-president of INNS) and Nobel
laureate Gerald Edelman (Rockefeller U). Edelman is one of six recipients of
the Nobel Prize who are active in neurocomputing. The others are David Hubel
(Harvard Medical School), this year's president of the Society for
Neuroscience, Thorsten Wiesel, who shared the 1981 Nobel with Hubel and is now
at Rockefeller U (though in a different laboratory from Edelman), Francis Crick
of the Salk Institute, Donald Glaser of U of CA/Berkeley, and, Leon Cooper from
Brown U and Nestor.
HNC
(formerly Hecht-Nielsen Neurocomputer Corp) of San Diego, CA, received an award
from R&D Magazine for the company's ANZA Plus neurocomputing board/software
product. The publication called the ANZA Plus board …
OCTOBER
1989
