IBM is pairing up with leading US universities to build a computer that it claims will emulate the capabilities of the human brain.

Big Blue and researchers from the universities of Stanford, Cornell and California, among others, have been awarded $4.9m (£3.28m) in funds from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

IBM said that the team hopes to break the "conventional programmable machine paradigm".

"The end goal is ubiquitously deployed computers imbued with a new intelligence that can integrate information from a variety of sensors and sources, deal with ambiguity, respond in a context-dependent way, learn over time and carry out pattern recognition to solve difficult problems based on perception, action and cognition in complex real-world environments," said IBM in a statement.

The research will emerge over the next nine months, according to IBM.

"We believe that our cognitive computing initiative will help shape the future of computing in a significant way, bringing to bear new technologies that we have not even begun to imagine," said Josephine Cheng, IBM fellow and researcher.