DARPA has awarded a $4.9 million grant for the first phase of DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project to IBM and university partners.

Scientists from University of Wisconsin-Madison, Columbia University and IBM will work on the software for the thinking computer, while nanotechnology and supercomputing experts from Cornell, Stanford and the University of California-Merced will create the hardware. Dharmendra Modha of IBM is the principal investigator.

The computing systems are expected to simulate and emulate the brain’s abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition while rivaling its low power consumption and compact size.