BARCELONA—"Project Zeroth" sounds like something a supervillain would engage in, right? Qualcomm isn't a supervillain, but the more you listen to explanations of Zeroth, the more comic-booky it sounds: it's an attempt to give your smartphone an actual brain.
The buzzword is "deep-learning neural networks," which describes an attempt to get computers to think in a fuzzy, nonlinear manner by modeling the way humans and other animals think. Humans excel at things that can befuddle a computer, like scenarios with broad margins of error and similarity like recognizing pictures of specific faces.
Zeroth takes the neural network concept and overlays it on a Qualcomm system-on-a-chip. SOCs, like Qualcomm's Snapdragon series, have a whole bunch of large and small processors - a main CPU, graphics processors, digital signal processors, and modems.
Zeroth is the code that lights up the whole thing, in brief flashes, as a neural network filled with cells that quickly interpret fuzzy data. It already works with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 processor, Qualcomm SVP Raj Talluri said, and the company is looking at making it work with other existing designs.
What This Brain Thinks
Talluri showed a few different applications for this learning machine. Initially, the neural code will be "trained" at Qualcomm. But as time goes on, applications could develop that learn as they go, while the phone is in your hands.
Qualcomm's flagship app is photo-scene detection. Trained with images of faces, architecture, the outdoors, and other scenes, the Zeroth system can figure out roughly what's in a picture and then change the camera settings to fit.
Handwriting recognition was also impressive. As you can see in the image above, it isn't perfect. But Talluri said it's very good at learning - better by far than most other OCR software.
As we brainstormed, we came up with a lot of other potential uses for a neural system. The phone could learn your habits - for instance, that you always pick your phone up a certain way when you're about to launch the camera, and prelaunch the camera in the background. Or that if it's past a certain time of night, and it's dark in the room, you're probably asleep, and certain notifications should be muted - but if you start fumbling for your phone, to wake up.
Zeroth applications will start to appear later this year, Qualcomm says.