Dharmendra S. Modha

My Work and Thoughts.

SfN 2007: Interactive visualization and graph analysis of CoCoMac’s brain parcellation and white matter connectivity data

By

Today, Raghav Singh and I presented a poster at Society for Neuroscience (SfN 2007) conference in San Diego, CA.

TITLE
Interactive visualization and graph analysis of CoCoMac’s brain parcellation and white matter connectivity data

ABSTRACT
We present a tool for visualizing and analyzing white matter brain connectivity data. The tool combines hierarchical mapping (brain parcellation) data with the connectivity data, thus providing structural organization to the complex connectivity graph. The mapping and connectivity data has been downloaded from the online CoCoMac database and algorithmically agglomerated. In order to create a hierarchical graph on the mapping data, we are interested only in identical, substructure and superstructure relationships. The important step in our algorithm is to create sets of maximal identical sites such that there are no contradictions, i.e., there are no cycles in the resulting hierarchy. Our final dataset contains 1014 brain sites and 9238 white matter connections.

The visualization tool organizes these brain sites as nodes on concentric circles, where the innermost node corresponds to the Brain and the outermost nodes correspond to the smallest subdivisions of the brain. Directed edges between nodes are the white matter connections. Besides standard GUI functions, the tool provides the capability to browse the data by selecting nodes and edges incident on nodes.

We have analyzed our dataset; the analysis includes metrics that Sporns proposed for white matter connectivity. Our results are very similar to his results; the connectivity graph is small world with a cluster index of 0.455, a diameter of 7 and about 33% of the total connections are reciprocal in nature. In comparison a random graph of the same dimensions, would result in cluster index of 0.019 and diameter of 6. We have also identified the hubs (node that is connecting to a lot of other nodes) and authorities (node that is being connected from a lot of other nodes) which gives a unique insight in that the parietal lobule is the best authority while the thalamus is the best hub in the graph. We are working on identifying the edges and nodes that are most susceptible to errors/attacks, and in laying out the connectivity graph such that it “flows” from the hubs to the authorities, and also evaluating the community structure of the graph.

UC Berkeley’s RAD Lab and IBM

By

RAD Lab

From left to right, Prof. Anthony Joseph (a RAD Lab P.I.), Dr. Jean Paul Jacob (IBM Research, Emeritus, IBM/Berkeley Campus Relationship Manager), Prof. Dave Patterson (creator and Director of RAD Lab), Dr. Jai Menon (IBM Fellow, VP Technical Strategy, Vice-Chair IBM Academy of Technology) and Dr. Dharmendra Modha (IBM Research Mgr. of Cognitive Computing and Berkeley PhD Recruiting Manager for IBM).

Last month, I had the privillege of visiting UC Berkeley’s RAD Lab on behalf of IBM which is an Affliate Member of the lab.

A Proposal for a Decade of the Mind Initiative

By

A few weeks back, we published a letter in Science proposing the Decade of the Mind initiative.

James S. Albus, George A. Bekey, John H. Holland, Nancy G. Kanwisher, Jeffrey L. Krichmar, Mortimer Mishkin, Dharmendra S. Modha, Marcus E. Raichle, Gordon M. Shepherd, and Giulio Tononi, "A Proposal for a Decade of the Mind Initiative" Science [Letter], Vol 317, Issue 5843, 7 September 2007:1321.

“What Makes Up My Mind?”

By

Today, Washington Post carried a wonderful piece on the Decade of the Mind Proposal.  Here are some excerpts:

Earlier this year, Jim Olds gathered a bunch of big thinkers at George Mason University for a two-day conference on the mind. He and his allies want the federal government to invest $4 billion in an initiative that would be called the "Decade of the Mind." This would be a follow-up to a 1990s program called the "Decade of the Brain," which brought increased attention to neuroscience. The new initiative would be an attempt to take science into a realm previously explored only by philosophers, theologians and mountaintop yogis.

"Brain science is an exhaustive collection of facts without a theory," Olds says. "This is for the nation as a whole to invest in one of the fundamental intellectual questions of what it is to be a human being." 

In a letter published a few weeks ago in the journal Science, 10 scientists said that a Decade of the Mind would help us understand mental disorders that affect 50 million Americans and cost more than $400 billion a year. It might also aid in the development of intelligent machines and new computing techniques. A breakthrough in mind research, the scientists wrote, could have "broad and dramatic impacts on the economy, national security, and our social well-being."

Ten years and $4 billion: That’s a reasonable cost. The evolution of the human mind is arguably the most important biological event in the history of our planet since the origin of life itself.

We should try to understand how the brain makes the mind. And then we can make up our minds about what to do with ourselves.

“Computers to rival humans, predicts IBM exec”

By

Visionary IBM executive, Alfred Zollar, General Manager of Tivoli Software, said in his keynote address  ‘Innovation that matters’ at GITEX Technology Week:

"By 2010, supercomputers will execute one quadrillion calculations per second. We will have computing capacity that operates at the same speed as the human brain."

See here for the press article.