Purdue kicks off new center focusing on autonomous systems

Kaushik Roy, the Edward G. Tiedemann Jr. Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will serve as the center’s director. (Purdue University photo/John Underwood) Download image

Purdue officials and leaders gathered Wednesday (Jan. 24) to celebrate the new Center for Brain-inspired Computing Enabling Autonomous Intelligence, or C-BRIC. Purdue will lead the national center to develop brain-inspired computing for intelligent autonomous systems such as drones and personal robots capable of operating without human intervention.

Speakers were President Mitch Daniels; Mung Chiang, the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering; and Kaushik Roy, C-BRIC director and the Edward G. Tiedemann Jr. Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Anand Raghunathan, C-BRIC associate director and professor of electrical and computer engineering, also was on hand.

Researchers at the center will work to develop autonomous intelligent systems capable of reasoning and decision-making to complete mission-critical tasks without human intervention, Roy said. 

The five-year project is supported with a $27 million grant from the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC) via its Joint University Microelectronics Program, which provides funding from a consortium of industrial sponsors as well as from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

More on C-BRIC is available in a Jan. 16 news release.