27.+Draft+Background+Section

Thus far I have been amassing a large library of related material and readings in Cognitive-behavioral therapy data, cognitive systems, neural networks—artificial and biological, backprobigation,--and virtual reality. In the realm of virtual reality, I have gathered works on anthropology of VR—meaning studies of cultural and societal groups that arise in virtual, built worlds; social phenomena within virtual worlds such as embodiment, design in virtual reality, and finally beginning to curate a cumulative list of resources pertaining to CBT professionals and labs. Compiling a list of labs and CBT professionals is the first step towards identifying interviewees, and understanding they work they do adds a different context to each question set per interview. I have attended one talk, on IBM’s cognitive computing systems with two cognitive scientists. I interviewed one of the men after, briefly talking about neural networks and improving virtual reality systems. Some of the conclusions that were made were that many virtual wolrds, including famed Second Life, were very limited but worked in the sense that interactions occurred in the virtual world that were carried out in the real world. Secondly, there was a very important conclusion made in that there are two major problems with cognitive computing at the moment: (1) that the brain is so complex, so large (despite its comparative non-impressiveness to the word “large), so layered that really, very little is known about it; and (2) the brain itself runs on a very low instance of power, only around 50 or so watts. So, the problem therein is, (1) how can we create computational models on an entity we know very little about, and (2) how can we do that with very little power? IBM’s best response to these questions thus far is their brain-inspired chip, TrueNorth, a technologically and architecturally innovative chip that focuses on mimicking the brain’s function and form—minimizing product of power, area, and delay to implement into state-of-the-art technology. It only consumes about 20 miliwatts. It has a parallel, modular, scalable, fault-tolerant, and flexible architecture which integrates communication and memory. It is redefining brain-inspired computers.