Computers and artificial intelligence continue to usher in major changes in the way people shop. It is relatively easy to train a robot's brain to create a shopping list, but what about ensuring that the robotic shopper can easily tell the difference between the thousands of products in the store?

Purdue University researchers and experts in brain-inspired computing think part of the answer may be found in magnets. The researchers have developed a process to use magnetics with brain-like networks to program and teach devices such as personal robots, self-driving cars and drones to better generalize about different objects.

"Our stochastic neural networks try to mimic certain activities of the human brain and compute through a connection of neurons and synapses," said Kaushik Roy, Purdue's Edward G. Tiedemann Jr. Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "This allows the computer brain to not only store information but also to generalize well about objects and then make inferences to perform better at distinguishing between objects."

Roy presented the technology during the annual German Physical Sciences Conference earlier this month in Germany. The work also appeared in the Frontiers in Neuroscience.

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