The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded a $4.9 million grant to five universities and IBM Research for the first phase of an ambitious research venture in cognitive computing, an emerging field that lies at the outer edge of artificial intelligence and is based on advances in computing, nanotechnology and neuroscience.

The leader of IBM’s cognitive computing program, Dharmendra Modha, describes the research as “the quest to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain.”