To help spur that future, Calit2 has set up a Pattern Recognition Laboratory with a variety of novel low-energy processors that can execute real-time trained neural networks in the exploding mobile environment of drones, robots, and self- driving cars. However, the training of these neural networks requires massive amounts of Big Data and computing time. To support this need the NSF-funded Pacific Research Platform (PRP), which connects two dozen research universities at 100-1000 times the speed of the commodity Internet, is creating a new community of computer science machine learning researchers and proposing using the optical fiber backbone of the PRP to create a distributed Graphics Processing Unit computing "cloud." Finally, I will speculate on the exponentially growing machine intelligence and how it will increasingly inter-operate with human intelligence.

Dan Goldin, who led the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the 1990s, officially unveiled a company with more than $100 million in private investment to focus on neural computing. The company KnuEdge was founded in 2005, but its two divisions -- one focused on voice biometrics and the other on data center neural computing -- worked in stealth mode to bring its first two products to maturity. KnuEdge boasts that its voice recognition and authentication product, called KnuVerse, is military-grade technology that spent five years in production in "mission-critical battlefield conditions." It's now available for enterprises interested in building human-voice interfaces that can function in noisy, real-world environments. It can be used to build authentication systems into computers, web or mobile apps and IoT devices, relying on just a few words in any language.

A new company launched Monday by former NASA chief Dan Goldin aims to deliver a major boost to the field of neural computing. KnuEdge's debut comes after 10 years in stealth; formerly it was called Intellisis. Now, along with its launch, it's introducing two products focused on neural computing: KnuVerse, software that focuses on military-grade voice recognition and authentication, and KnuPath, a processor designed to offer a new architecture for neural computing. "While at NASA I became fascinated with biology," said Goldin in an interview last week. "When the time came to leave NASA, I decided the future of technology would be in machine intelligence, and I felt a major thrust had to come from inspiration from the mammalian brain."

From 1992 to 2001, Dan Goldin served as the longest-tenured administrator of NASA, overseeing projects like the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor and the redesign of the International Space Station. After leaving NASA, Goldin spent some time bouncing around and studying robotics before accepting a position as the president of Boston University in 2003. He never officially held the position, however, because the school terminated his contract a day before he was slated to start (though he still got a 1.8 million payout). And then Goldin mostly vanished from the public eye for over 10 years. Today, the 75-year-old Goldin has reemerged to reveal what he has been working on for the past decade: KnuEdge, a top-secret startup based in San Diego, with a mission to one-up Google, AMD, and Intel with the "fundamental invention" of the next-generation computer processor.

It's not all that easy to call KnuEdge a startup. Created a decade ago by Daniel Goldin, the former head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, KnuEdge is only now coming out of stealth mode. It has already raised 100 million in funding to build a "neural chip" that Goldin says will make data centers more efficient in a hyperscale age. Goldin, who founded the San Diego, California-based company with the former chief technology officer of NASA, said he believes the company's brain-like chip will be far more cost and power efficient than current chips based on the computer design popularised by computer architect John von Neumann. In von Neumann machines, memory and processor are separated and linked via a data pathway known as a bus.

After almost 10 years of working incognito, former National Aeronautics and Space Administration head Daniel Goldin is finally ready to formally present KnuEdge to the world. KnuEdge is a "neural technology innovation company," an outfit that builds hardware and software based on neural technology, with a main focus on human-machine interaction. While newly revealed publicly, it has been in stealth mode for a decade now, and has already raised 100 million in funding to build its neural chips. The company has revealed its two primary products: KnuVerse, which is a voice authentication technology, and KnuPath, its state-of-the-art neural chip. It has also unveiled Knurld.io, a software development kit with a cloud-based voice recognition and authentication service. Foremost of these offerings is KnuPath.

From 1992 to 2001, Dan Goldin served as the longest-tenured Adminstrator of NASA, overseeing projects like the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour and the redesign of the International Space Station. After leaving NASA, Goldin spent some time bouncing around and studying robotics, before accepting a position as the president of Boston University in 2003 -- a position Goldin never officially held, because the school terminated his contract a day before he was slated to start, though he still got a 1.8 million payout. And then, Goldin mostly vanished from the public eye for over ten years. Today, the 75-year-old Goldin has reemerged to reveal what he's been working on for the last decade: KnuEdge, a top-secret startup based in San Diego, with a mission to one-up Google, AMD, and Intel with the "fundamental invention" of the next-generation computer processor. "I'm not an incrementalist; I wanted to wait for the grand slam," Goldin tells Business Insider.

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 better handle those calculations The company, KnuEdge, has modeled its computer chip on the human brain in an attempt to increase the speed of 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. Over the last 10 years, he has supervised the slow process of building the new chip from scratch.

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.

Daniel Goldin has an impressive resume. The 75-year-old spent over a quarter century in the aerospace industry during the first leg of his career, went on to become the director of NASA and is now returning to the fold as the head of a newly launched startup. KnuEdge Inc., as the outfit is called, hit the scene today with a homegrown processor specifically designed to run machine learning algorithms. Dubbed KNUPATH, the chip sports 256 cores and 16 bidirectional I/O paths that provide 320 Gbs of throughput. It's also well-equipped to run in large environments, with the startup claiming that a single deployment can scale to over half a million nodes while keeping inter-rack latency at around 400 milliseconds.