Monash researchers win grant for brain-AI synthesis

Researchers from Monash University have been awarded a nearly $600,000 grant to explore growing human brain cells into silicon chips for advanced AI capabilities.

The new research program, which is being conducted in collaboration with Melbourne startup Cortical Labs, involves growing around 800,000 brain cells living in a dish which are then taught to perform goal-directed tasks such as playing Pong.

The program has been awarded a grant from the National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants Program.

Lead researcher Associate Professor Adeel Razi said the program is designed to merge the fields of AI and synthetic biology to explore the development of programmable biological computing platforms.

“This new technology capability in future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware,” he said.

“The outcomes of such research would have significant implications across multiple fields such as, but not limited to, planning, robotics, advanced automation, brain-machine interfaces and drug discovery, giving Australia a significant strategic advantage.”

He said the grant award was a recognition of the fact that the next generation of applications of machine learning, such as autonomous drones and vehicles and delivery robots, will require a type of machine intelligence capable of learning throughout its lifetime.

Current AI is incapable of doing this and suffers from a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting, but the human brain excels at continual lifelong learning.

“We will be using this grant to develop better AI machines that replicate the learning capacity of these biological neural networks. This will help us scale up the hardware and methods capacity to the point where they become a viable replacement for [silicon] computing,” Razi said.

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