Abstract not provided

Marching along the DARPA SyNAPSE roadmap, IBM unveils a trilogy of innovations towards the TrueNorth cognitive computing system inspired by the brain's function and efficiency. The sequential programming paradigm of the von Neumann architecture is wholly unsuited for TrueNorth. Therefore, as our main contribution, we develop a new programming paradigm that permits construction of complex cognitive algorithms and applications while being efficient for TrueNorth and effective for programmer productivity. The programming paradigm consists of (a) an abstraction for a TrueNorth program, named Corelet, for representing a network of neurosynaptic cores that encapsulates all details except external inputs and outputs; (b) an object-oriented Corelet Language for creating, composing, and decomposing corelets; (c) a Corelet Library that acts as an ever-growing repository of reusable corelets from which programmers compose new corelets; and (d) an end-to-end Corelet Laboratory that is a programming environment which integrates with the TrueNorth architectural simulator, Compass, to support all aspects of the programming cycle from design, through development, debugging, and up to deployment. The new paradigm seamlessly scales from a handful of synapses and neurons to networks of neurosynaptic cores of progressively increasing size and complexity. The utility of the new programming paradigm is underscored by the fact that we have designed and implemented more than 100 algorithms as corelets for TrueNorth in a very short time span.

Delivering services cost-effectively benefits from economies of scale, not dissimilar to the production of goods. Customizing services to the specific needs of a customer - either the service interfaces or the delivery system - incurs additional costs of setting up the service delivery system to be able to fulfill a specific variant and the excess costs of operating this additional system. Service providers need to understand the trade-off between service standardization and customization. We propose a domain independent approach to identify the variation scope of existing instances and derive a normative model of admissible configurations.

Design in many settings is an inherently collective and creative undertaking, with phenomena of emergence at the heart of the activity. Cognitive accounts of emergence in the context of design have not taken its collective nature into account. At the same time accounts of collective emergence do not recognize certain salient attributes of design, including the importance of visual thinking and various media for external representation. With reference to two distinct theories of emergence, Oxman's account of design emergence in terms of visual cognition, and Sawyer's account of collaborative emergence in conversation and performance, this paper reports results from a study of a high-performing, technologically mediated concurrent design practice. Participant observation, interviews, and video interaction analysis were used to render the creative process of engineering design in fine-grained detail. The resulting insights support aspects of both theories in that creative activity appears to proceed substantially through modalities of visual cognition, while collaborative products are arrived at through an essentially collective process involving multiple participants and unpredictable developments. The combined view presents a richer picture than either theory alone.