Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha is an IBM Fellow and IBM Chief Scientist for Brain-inspired Computing. He is a Cognitive Computing pioneer who envisioned and now leads a highly successful effort to develop Brain-inspired Computers. The project has received ~$70 million in research funding from DARPA (under SyNAPSE Program), US Department of Defense, US Department of Energy, and Commercial Customers. The ground-breaking project is multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, and mult-national and has a world-wide scientific impact. The resulting architecture, technology, and ecosystem breaks path with the prevailing von Neumann architecture (circa 1946) and constitutes a foundation for energy-efficient, scalable neuromorphic systems.
Dr. Modha’s work has been featured in many thousands of media articles including The Economist, Science, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, BBC, CNN, PBS, Discover, MIT Technology Review, Associated Press, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Spectrum, Forbes, Fortune, Time, amongst many others. His work has been featured on covers of Science (twice), Communications of the ACM, and Scientific American.
Author of over 70 papers and inventor of over 100 patent disclosures, he has been awarded 2016 Scientist of the Year by R&D Magazine; Misha Mahowald Prize; ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize; USENIX/FAST Test of Time Award; Best Paper Awards at ASYNC and IDEMI; First Place, Science/NSF International Science & Engineering Visualization Contest; IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumni Award; Runner-up for the 2014 Science Breakthrough of the Year; 2015 R&D 100 Award (Editor’s Choice for IT/Electrical); and is a Fellow of IEEE and World Technology Network. In 2013 and 2014, he was named the Best of IBM. On their 40th Anniversary, EE Times named him amongst 10 Electronic Visionaries to watch. TrueNorth Brain-inspired Processor has been accepted into the Computer History Museum.
Dr. Modha has made significant contributions to IBM Businesses via innovations in caching algorithms for storage controllers, clustering algorithms for services, and coding theory for disk drives. At IBM, he has won the Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper award (Three Times), an Outstanding Innovation Award, an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, and Communication Systems Best Paper Award. He is an IBM Master Inventor. In 2010, he was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology. In 2014, he was appointed an IBM Fellow.
Dr. Modha holds a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of California at San Diego.