DARPA's Brain Drain

The New Jersey Star Ledger reports that the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has scrapped its ambitious project to reverse engineer the human brain. The so-called Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures seemed to be at the vanguard of the agency's drive toward cognitive computing, and its early demise has left researchers involved in the work mystified, and naturally, a bit upset, as the article notes:

*Scientists from Rutgers, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a dozen other schools and institutions set out in 2005 to map the complex workings of the brain, in hopes of creating software that someday might help leaner combat forces fight smarter. *

*Now, as researchers scramble to salvage their pieces of the puzzle, some are lamenting the loss of a rare chance to work closely with diverse experts -- a cross-pollination of neuroscientists, psychologists and computer scientists -- they say promised bold approaches to demystify the brain. *

"It was all very exciting. ... It's hard to know at the outset if it was too ambitious," said Mark Gluck, a neuroscientist at Rutgers-Newark who, like others on the project, was left scratching his head over its demise.

"All we know is it's dead," Gluck said.

The program, described by some as a "Manhattan Project" of neural research, was supposed "to replicate how different parts of the brain interact -- sometimes pulling together, sometimes not -- to solve problems," the article says.

What's unusual about the the program's demise is how little information the agency is providing about why they killed it. DARPA apparently denied requests for an interview, and the agency's spokeswoman didn't provide any more clues, citing my all time favorite Pentagon aphorism, "changing priorities." The article also hints that the program's demise might be linked to the agency's mercurial director -- currently the longest-serving head of DARPA.

The article suggests that one reason behind the move might be DARPA's increasing focus on systems designed to quickly support troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, as opposed to long-term research. But even if that's the case, DARPA hasn't given much indication that the funding shift would come from cognitive computing. In fact, in Noah's recent interview with DARPA's director, Tony Tether, the agency head emphasized progress in cognitive computing, saying:

We're on the verge of having computers with densities approaching a monkey's brain, and it won't be long before we'll have a computer with the density of transistors, or equivalent to neurons and almost human. What we're missing is the architecture. So it seemed like it was time. We had great advances in algorithms for reasoning and in algorithms that learned in general. At the same time, the computers, the actual intrinsic hardware, was really approaching the density of a human brain. And so it seemed like it was time to try again. We've had some great success.

Somehow, I doubt the agency is going to provide any more clues about why this research ended up on the chopping block.