Dharmendra S. Modha

My Work and Thoughts.

Archives for May 2008

Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience

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Yesterday, along with my colleagues, I attended the open house at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience in UC Berkeley. The center is part of Helen Wilis Neuroscience Institute. I had a chance to spend time with Jeff Hawkins, Horst Simon, Robert Knight, Bruno Olshausen, Fritz Sommer, Michael DeWeese, Pentti Kanerva, and many others

The center was initially founded by Jeff Hawkins as Redwood Neuosciences Institute about six years ago. Roughly, three years agao, Jeff and Dileep George branched off to found Numenta, while Bruno Olshausen and colleagues came to Berkeley.  

Mark Dean

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At the 2008 Almaden Institute, I also the honor to introduce Dr. Mark Dean who gave a truly passionate and fascinating talk about Africa.

Our distinhuished speaker is Dr. Mark Dean. Dr. Dean holds a PhD from Stanford.

Dr. Dean holds three of the nine original IBM patents upon which the IBM personal computers were based. He is best known for his invention of the "ISA bus" that forms the spine of modern day computer architecture. For this invention, he has been elected to National Inventor’s Hall of Fame. A rare and significant honor. He has was also instrumental in the design of the first gigahertz CMOS microprocessor, and established the team that developed Blue Gene supercomputer.

Dr. Dean embodies the very essence of excellence within IBM being both an IBM Fellow which is a technical executive and Vice President of Almaden Reseach Center which is a business executive and is the Senior Location Executive for Silicon Valley. He serves on IBM’s Technology Council.

Dr. Dean has more than 40 patents, and has received thirteen Invention Achievement Awards and six Corporate Awards.

His external honors include amonst many others: National Institute of Science Outstanding Scientist Award, IEEE Fellow, Member of National Academy of Engineers, Ronald H. Brown American Innovators Award, NSBE Distinguished Engineer Award, PC Magazine World Class Award, and University of Tennessee COE Dougherty Award.

Horst Simon

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Last week, at 2008 Almaden Institute, I had the privillege of inviting and introducing one of the key note speakers, Dr. Horst Simon. He gave a truly fascinating talk. Here is my introduction:

Our distinguished key note speaker today is Dr. Horst Simon. Dr. Simon holds a PhD in Mathematics from UC Berkeley.

He is best known for his breakthrough work on highly parrallel recursice spectral bisection algorithm and for his work on partitioning sparse matrices. He has won the Gordon Bell Prize and has received H. Julian Allen Award from NASA.

He has been a Senior Manager at Silicon Graphics, Computer Sciences Corporation, and Boeing, and has been on the faculty at State University of New York. From 1996-2006, he served as Director of Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center which is the flagship scientific computing facility for the Office of Science in the U.S. Department of Energy. He is currently Associate Lab director at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Director of Computational Research Division. He is an Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley, and recently led creation of a multidisciplinary new initiative Computational Science and Engineering.

He has served on boards of several organizations and on editorial boards of several journals in high-performance computing arena.

In my view, he is Mr. Supercomputing in the academic world today. He is co-author of TOP 500 which is a twice-yerarly revised list of the world’s most powerful computer systems, and provides the most direct window into future of computing.