Former NASA Chief Reveals Brain-Like Chip Venture

One of the lesser-known projects being pursued by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the development of software that learns automatically to find patterns in scientific data. Now, the project could get its computer hardware from an oddly familiar source: the agency's former chief, Dan Goldin, who founded a startup making chips to do those kinds of tasks. The company, KnuEdge, has modeled its computer chip on the human brain in an attempt to better handle programs that fall under the umbrella of machine learning. The new chip could be plugged into data centers to teach itself such jobs as sorting images, understanding language, and following trends in streams of data. Goldin founded the company in 2005, keeping its operations secret until he revealed the new chip on Monday morning, along with voice recognition software that excels in noisy environments.