Abstract
Recent years have witnessed a tremendous explosion of data, which continues unabatedly: it is estimated that the digital universe is growing at a rate of about 60% per year. All this data significantly improves our understanding of today's incredibly complex economies and societies. It ushers in a new era of computing, namely, the cognitive era, in which the data is considered a new natural resource.

However, cognitive computers based on the classical von-Neumann computing architecture pose serious challenges in terms of area and power consumption. This has triggered research efforts to unravel and understand the highly efficient computational paradigm of the human brain, with the aim of creating brain-inspired artificial cognitive systems.  IBM with its fully digital TrueNorth chip architecture reached a key milestone in mimicking neural networks "in silico”. Besides fully digital approaches, also analog and hybrid architectures are being investigated.

Most recently, post-silicon nanoelectronic devices with memristive properties are also finding applications beyond the realm of memory. It is becoming increasingly clear that for application areas such as cognitive computing, we need to transition to computing architectures in which memory and logic coexist in some form. Brain-inspired neuromorphic computing and the fascinating new area of memory computing are two key non-von Neumann approaches being researched. A critical requirement in these novel computing paradigms is a very-high-density, low-power, variable-state, programmable and non-volatile nanoscale memory device. The emerging storage-class memory devices are well suited to address this need. I will present a few examples to highlight this fascinating new research area.

Bio
Evangelos Eleftheriou received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, in 1985. He joined the IBM Research – Zurich laboratory in Rüschlikon, Switzerland, as a Research Staff Member in 1986. Since 1998, he has held various management positions and currently heads the Cloud and Computing Infrastructure department of IBM Research – Zurich, which focuses on enterprise solid-state storage, storage for big data, microserver/cloud server and accelerator technologies, high-speed I/O links, storage security, and memory and cognitive technologies.  He has authored or co-authored about 200 publications, and holds over 160 patents (granted and pending applications). In 2002, he became a Fellow of the IEEE. He was co-recipient of the 2003 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award. He was also co-recipient of the prestigious 2005 Technology Award of the Eduard Rhein Foundation. In 2005, he was appointed an IBM Fellow and inducted into the IBM Academy of Technology. In 2009, he was co-recipient of the IEEE CSS Control Systems Technology Award and of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award. In 2016, he received a honoris causa professorship from the University of Patras.