IBM Plans Cognitive Computing Research Center with University of Illinois

In keeping with its vision of an era of cognitive computing enabled by acceleration technology, IBM Research (NYSE: IBM) today announced plans for a multi-year collaboration with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to create the Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR) which will be housed within the College of Engineering on the Urbana campus. IBM has big ambitions for the center: "C3SR will build and optimize integrated systems such as state-of-the-art cognitive computing systems modeled on IBM's Watson technology that can master a subject area by learning from multimedia and multi-modal educational content. Such systems will efficiently ingest vast amounts of data including videos, lecture notes, homework, and textbooks, and reason through this knowledge effectively enough to be able to eventually pass a college level exam." Many details are yet to be worked out. The level of funding and size of installation will be announced this summer when the new center formally opens, said Hillery Hunter, a project driver and the director for systems acceleration and memory at IBM Research.