With 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses, the human brain is the world’s best computer. Mapping its wiring and making a similarly powerful computer is a Herculean task. But then, Dharmendra Modha is the Hercules of the hardest computing science called Cognitive Computing, who has the ultimate Internet honour, which is that googling the discipline takes you straight to his name. Dharmendra, who is the manager of Cognitive Computing Almaden Research Institute at IBM, has a BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Mumbai, and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California. Apart from working at IBM’s Almaden research center since 1997, he has also launched two start-ups called Treelet and Solutions in the US and India respectively. He was responsible for DARPA’s SyNAPSE proposal, that brought together IBM and many American universities to reverse-engineer the brain and make a similar computer that can be put on a small, energy-efficient chip. This master inventor, who has over 26 US patents and over 40 publications in cognitive computing, got his first breakthrough in 2009 when he announced that his team was able to write a programme that simulated a cat’s brain. For this work he received ACM’s Gordon Bell prize, which is given ‘every year to recognise outstanding achievements in high-performance computing’. At IBM itself he received numerous awards, like an outstanding innovation award. One day, when a computer mimics a brain, Dharmendra will most likely be it’s architect.