Qualcomm Reveals Neural Network Progress
Biologically inspired neural processing units (NPUs) were recently described by Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego at the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference. Qualcomm chief technology officer (CTO) Matt Grob described a new generation of NPUs and design tools that Qualcomm hopes to make available to developers next year.
Purdue University researchers also use neural networks to create an image-processing application that can categorize objects from a moving car in real-time.
At the conference, Grob showed videos of what it calls its Zeroth Robot prototype — named after Isaac Asimov’s Zeroth Law of Robotics (that no robots shall harm humanity). These robots were not powered by a conventional computer but instead by biologically inspired NPUs modeled on the human brain and created in cooperation with Brain Corp, which receives funding from Qualcomm Ventures and operates its labs inside Qualcomm’s facility.According to Grob, even though these early prototypes are general-purpose image processors that learn their application rather than depend on complicated hand-written algorithms, they are already offering comparable performance to the best custom-designed image processing algorithms for conventional computers today. Qualcomm has also cited professor Eugenio Culurciello, who is using Purdue University’s own neural network development tools, to perform real-time image recognition of objects from moving cars (see figure).