Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha

Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha is an IBM Fellow and IBM Chief Scientist for Brain-inspired Computers.  He is a cognitive computing pioneer who envisioned and now leads a highly successful effort to develop brain-inspired computers. The groundbreaking project is multi-disciplinary, multi-national, multi-institutional and has had worldwide scientific impact.  It has been funded to the tune of $64M by DARPA, DOD, DOE, and Commercial contracts.  Its resulting revolutionary computing architecture and ecosystem break from the prevailing von Neumann paradigm and constitute a foundation for new classes of ultra-low-power, compact, real-time, multi-modal sensorimotor information technology systems. Dr. Modha has also made significant contributions to IBM businesses via innovations in caching mechanisms for storage controllers, clustering algorithms for services, and coding theory for disk drives.  His work has been featured in Economist, Science, New York Times, BBC, Discover, MIT Technology Report, Associated Press, Popular Mechanics, Communications of the ACM, Forbes, Fortune, and IEEE Spectrum amongst thousands of media mentions. Author of over 70 papers and inventor of over 100 patents, he has been a recipient of ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize; Misha Mahowald Prize; R&D Magazine’s 2016 Scientist of the Year; USENIX/FAST Test of Time Award; Best Paper Awards at ASYNC and IDEMI; First Place, Science/NSF International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge; IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award; R&D 100 Award; and is a Fellow of IEEE and World Technology Network. In 2013 and 2014, he was named as Best of IBM.  TrueNorth Brain-inspired Processor has been accepted into the Computer History Museum.  On their 40th Anniversary, EE Times named Dr. Modha amongst 10 Electronics Visionaries to Watch. Dr. Modha received BTech from IIT Bombay in 1990 and PhD from UCSD in 1995.