The man with two brains

Published on E&T magazine of IET by Paul Dempsey

Jeff Hawkins sired the personal digital assistant and today’s smartphones as the founder of Palm Computing. But, frankly, this was never much of a priority for him. Even as a young engineer at Intel, he was nagging microprocessor pioneer Ted Hoff to let him investigate parallels between computing and the human brain. Back in the 1970s, Hoff said no – a decision Hawkins now agrees with – but as science and theory advanced, he returned to his obsession. In 2002, Hawkins set up the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, concentrating on brain theory, and in 2004, launched the start-up Numenta, which is developing a computing architecture called Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM). At this year’s International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Hawkins described prototype HTM visual recognition systems, addressing a task that remains hugely challenging for computers. But it is one that the animal brain finds quite straightforward. It is one reason why a growing body of people, such as Hawkins, are looking more closely at the structure of the brain. Click fore more...

It thinks... therefore...

Published on E&T magazine of IET by Chris Edwards

Research into machine consciousness is leading engineers to re-evaluate the relevance of philosophy, discovers Chris Edwards. Inventor Ray Kurzweil has a dream. And he intends to live to see it. He claims he takes a daily cocktail of pills to help make sure he is around to witness the creation of the first artificial brain: something he reckons will happen by the end of the 2020s. One of Kurzweil’s hopes is that this will make it possible to cheat death: we could upload our consciousness into the machine and remain conscious just as long as the computer receives power and maintenance. But the prospect raises a conundrum: would that machine actually be conscious? Would it think? How would we know? Even if it told us it could see and feel, would we believe it? Or would we consider it no more than a simulation of consciousness, where the lights are on but nobody is home? Questions like these are leading engineers to consider whether it is time for the discipline to merge with philosophy, as engineering by itself will be unable to provide the answers. Philosophy as such still struggles with the questions. We don’t really know what intelligence is and whether consciousness is effectively synonymous with it. But the quest to uncover consciousness in an artificial entity may provide clues that classic philosophical introspection has not managed to uncover. Click for more...

Chemical brain controls nanobots

Published by BBC on 11/03/2008

A tiny chemical "brain" which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines has been invented.
The molecular device - just two billionths of a metre across - was able to control eight of the microscopic machines simultaneously.
Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists say it could also be used to boost the processing power of future computers. Many experts have high hopes for nano-machines in treating disease. "If you want to remotely operate on a tumour you might want to send some molecular machines there," explained Dr Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan. "But you cannot just put them into the blood and [expect them] to go to the right place." Dr Bandyopadhyay believes his device may offer a solution. One day they may be able to guide the nanobots through the body and control their functions, he said. "That kind of device simply did not exist; this is the first time we have created a nano-brain". Click for more...

Plan to teach baby robot to talk

Published by BBC on 28/02/2008

A university in Devon is preparing to find out if a baby robot can be taught to talk. Staff at the University of Plymouth will work with a 1m-high (3ft) humanoid baby robot called iCub. Over the next four years robotics experts will work with language development specialists who research how parents teach children to speak. Their findings could lead to the development of humanoid robots which learn, think and talk. The project is believed to be the first of its kind in the world and typical experiments with the iCub robot will include activities such as inserting objects of various shapes into the corresponding holes in a box, serialising nested cups and stacking wooden blocks. Click fore more...

Visionary Research: Teaching Computers to See Like a Human

Published 20/02/08 on Scientific American by Larry Greenemeier

For all their sophistication, computers still can't compete with nature's gift—a brain that sorts objects quickly and accurately enough so that people and primates can interpret what they see as it happens. Despite decades of development, computer vision systems still get bogged down by the massive amounts of data necessary just to identify the most basic images. Throw that same image into a different setting or change the lighting and artificial intelligence is even less of a match for good old gray matter.

These shortcomings become more pressing as demand grows for security systems that can recognize a known terrorist's face in a crowded airport and car safety mechanisms such as a sensor that can hit the brakes when it detects a pedestrian or another vehicle in the car's path. Seeking the way forward, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are looking to advances in neuroscience for ways to improve artificial intelligence, and vice versa. The school's leading minds in both neural and computer sciences are pooling their research, mixing complex computational models of the brain with their work on image processing. Click for more...

Harnessing Digital Evolution

The following article has been published in the IEEE Computer magazine (January 2008), describing the evolution of digital organisms. It makes a very interesting reading and it is definitely one of the most promising areas of computer design & robotics. Look out for it!

Abstract

In digital evolution, self-replicating computer programs—digital organisms—experience mutations and selective pressures, potentially producing computational systems that, like natural organisms, adapt to their environment and protect themselves from threats. Such organisms can help guide the design of computer software. Click here for more information...

Citation: Philip McKinley, Betty H.C. Cheng, Charles Ofria, David Knoester, Benjamin Beckmann, Heather Goldsby, "Harnessing Digital Evolution," Computer, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 54-63, Jan., 2008

Words of wisdom for scientists...

A. "...intuition is often the biggest obstacle to discovering the truth"
B. "...the best solutions to scientific problems are simple and elegant"
Jeff Hawkins, "On Intelligence" p.32, p34

Baby's errors are crucial first step for a smarter robot

Published on 05.10.07 by Michael Reilly and David Robson
on NewScientist Magazine issue 2624

When your software crashes, you probably restart your PC and hope it doesn't happen again, or you get the bug fixed. But not Rachel Wood. When a program she was testing screwed up a task that a 2-year-old would find easy, she was elated. The reason for this seemingly perverse reaction is that Wood's program didn't contain a bug, but had committed a famous cognitive goof identified by the psychology pioneer Jean Piaget. Known as the A-not-B error, it is made by babies between 7 and 12 months old and is seen as one of the hallmarks of fledgling human intelligence. Wood's robot has a brain far simpler than a baby's. But unravelling the events that led to this human-like behaviour - something that is easier to do in a computer program than a real brain - could help improve our understanding of artificial intelligence. Click for more...

[G.K Comment: Robots with built-in trial & error functionality for fixing "bugs"... that's the future.]

Essential circuits of cognition: The brain’s basic operations, architecture, and representations

Published by Richard Granger (University of California Irvine and Dartmouth College) on BrainEngineering.com

The goals of artificial intelligence have always been twofold: i) formal explanation of the mechanisms underlying human (and animal) intelligence and ii)construction of powerful intelligent artifacts based on those mechanisms. The latter engineering goal may pragmatically benefit from the former scientific one: extant face recognition systems and automated telephone operators might have been considered the best possible mechanisms were it not for our own abilities. The only reason that we know that these industrial systems can be outperformed is that humans do so. Biological systems achieve their cognitive capabilities solely through brain mechanisms: the physiological operation of anatomical circuitries. Brain circuits are circuits; that is, they can be understood in computational terms. An explosion of knowledge in neuroscience and related fields is revealing the data crucial for characterizing the layout and properties of these circuits. Click for more... (.pdf)

Automated Killers and the Computing Profession

Published by Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield on Computer.org

When will we realize that our artificial-intelligence and autonomous-robotics research projects have been harnessed to manufacture killing machines? This is not terminator-style science fiction but grim reality: South Korea and Israel have both deployed armed robot border guards, while other nations—including China, India, Russia, Singapore, and the UK—increasingly use military robots. Currently, the biggest player, the US, has robots playing an integral part in its Future Combat Systems project, with spending estimated to exceed $230 billion. The US military has massive and realistic plans to develop unmanned vehicles that can strike from the air, under the sea, and on land. The US Congress set a goal in 2001 for one-third of US operational ground combat vehicles to be unmanned by 2015. More than 4,000 robots presently serve in Iraq, with others deployed in Afghanistan. The US military will spend $1.7 billion on more ground-based robots over the next five years, several of which will be armed and dangerous. Click for more...

[G.K Comment: Computer ethics is an extremely complex issue that is going to play a major role in the months and years to come, as more and more robots are deployed in the battlefield. Autonomous systems are always going to fail under specific circumstances regardless of how intelligent they become. But who is responsible if a robot unfairly causes a casualty? This article raises many valid questions that all computer scientists should be concerned about.]