Neuromorphic chips could help reverse-engineer the human brain

 Researchers at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich have designed a sophisticated computer system that is comparable in size, speed and energy consumption to the human brain. Based on the development of neuromorphic microchips that mimic the properties of biological neurons, the research is seen as an important step in understanding how the human brain processes information and opens the door to fast, extremely low-power electronic systems that can assimilate sensory input and perform user-defined tasks in real time.

A smarter silicon retina

The researchers tested their findings on an advanced electronic camera known as silicon retina with a visual-processing-based task inspired by those used to evaluate the cognitive abilities of human subjects.

"The subject (our neuromorphic system in our case) is presented with a cue at the beginning of the experiment which specifies the rule to use for the task," Indiveri explained. "The subject is required to look at a screen in which a horizontal bar and a vertical bar are moving, and depending on the initial cue, the subject is supposed to report if and when a vertical bar crosses the middle of the screen from left to right, or if a horizontal bar crosses it from right to left."

Aside from real-time visual processing, the task also requires memory and context-dependent decision making, elements that are commonly accepted as signs of cognition. Interestingly, the neural structures that form as this visual test is performed has shown a remarkable similarity with neural structures in the mammalian brain.


"The recurrent neural circuits implemented in the system have the same type of connectivity patterns found in the visual cortex of the cat," says Indiveri. "In particular, they implement soft winner-take-all circuits that are based on descriptions of canonical microcircuits found in the visual cortex."

Source: http://www.gizmag.com

Harvard creates brain-to-brain interface, allows humans to control other animals with thoughts alone

Researchers at Harvard University have created the first noninvasive brain-to-brain interface (BBI) between a human… and a rat. Simply by thinking the appropriate thought, the BBI allows the human to control the rat’s tail. This is one of the most important steps towards BBIs that allow for telepathic links between two or more humans — which is a good thing in the case of friends and family, but terrifying if you stop to think about the nefarious possibilities of a fascist dictatorship with mind control tech.

In recent years there have been huge advances in the field of brain-computer interfaces, where your thoughts are detected and “understood” by a sensor attached to a computer, but relatively little work has been done in the opposite direction (computer-brain interfaces). This is because it’s one thing for a computer to work out what a human is thinking (by asking or observing their actions), but another thing entirely to inject new thoughts into a human brain. To put it bluntly, we have almost no idea of how thoughts are encoded by neurons in the brain. For now, the best we can do is create a computer-brain interface that stimulates a region of the brain that’s known to create a certain reaction — such as the specific part of the motor cortex that’s in charge of your fingers. We don’t have the power to move your fingers in a specific way — that would require knowing the brain’s encoding scheme — but we can make them jerk around.

Which brings us neatly onto Harvard’s human-mouse brain-to-brain interface. The human wears a run-of-the-mill EEG-based BCI, while the mouse is equipped with a focused ultrasound (FUS) computer-brain interface (CBI). FUS is a relatively new technology that allows the researchers to excite a very specific region of neurons in the rat’s brain using an ultrasound signal. The main advantage of FUS is that, unlike most brain-stimulation techniques, such as DBS, it isn’t invasive. For now it looks like the FUS equipment is fairly bulky, but future versions might be small enough for use in everyday human CBIs.

With the EEG equipped, the BCI detects whenever the human looks at a specific pattern on a computer screen. The BCI then fires off a command to rat’s CBI, which causes ultrasound to be beamed into the region of the rat’s motor cortex that deals with tail movement. As you can see in the video above, this causes the rat’s tail to move. The researchers report that the human BCI has an accuracy of 94%, and that it generally takes around 1.5 seconds for the entire process — from the human deciding to look at the screen, through to the movement of the rat’s tail. In theory, the human could trigger a rodent tail-wag by simply thinking about it, rather than having to look at a specific pattern — but presumably, for the sake of this experiment, the researchers wanted to focus on the FUS CBI, rather than the BCI.

Moving forward, the researchers now need to work on the transmitting of more complex ideas, such as hunger or sexual arousal, from human to rat. At some point, they’ll also have to put the FUS CBI on a human, to see if thoughts can be transferred in the opposite direction. Finally, we’ll need to combine an EEG and FUS into a single unit, to allow for bidirectional sharing of thoughts and ideas. Human-to-human telepathy is the most obvious use, but what if the same bidirectional technology also allows us to really communicate with animals, such as dogs? There would be huge ethical concerns, of course, especially if a dictatorial tyrant uses the tech to control our thoughts — but the same can be said of almost every futuristic, transhumanist technology.

Credits : ExtremeTech

Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov dreams of cybernetic immortality

Source from Online NEWS media: Thirty-two-year-old Dmitry Itskov made a dot-com fortune in Russia, founding what eventually became the online media company New Media Stars. And now that's he's part of the one percent, he aims to give back to humanity in a big way. In 2011, he announced his 2045 Initiative for taking humanity to the next evolutionary level. The Initiative's goals include extending the human life span, augmenting our native intelligence, and extending our minds into machines. 

In a conference call with reporters today, Itskov outlined those plans for advancing humanity's physical, mental, and spiritual evolution and previewed the upcoming Global Future 2045 International Congress, set to take place at New York's Lincoln Center June 15 and 16. Itskov says that the major focus of his organization is to develop the technologies for extending human consciousness into robotic avatars, the kind familiar to fans of sci-fi movies like Surrogates and James Cameron's epic Avatar. 

"By the date of 2045," Itskov says, "the artificial body will be superior to the biological body in terms of its abilities. You will look and feel and act like a human." He anticipates people coming to prefer using the avatars to staying in their own bodies. "Eventually I think everybody will realize that it's better to continue living in an artificial body than to die in the biological one, when the original biological body is exhausted." 

The next order of business for the 2045 Initiative: establish a research center for advancing the work of figuring out what exactly consciousness is, and how it could be transferred into a robot. "I actually sent a proposal with the structure for such a research center to the Russian government," Itskov says. "But my ideal vision is to have an international collaboration." Ultimately he envisions a friendly international competition between centers not only in Russia, but also in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, Brazil, and elsewhere. 

Why put all this energy into pushing beyond humanity's limitations? Itskov says that, along the way to becoming a business success, he began to question the meaning of his own life and that of those around him. "I wanted to understand—what is consciousness and what is the potential of its development?" he says. Itskov says that asking these questions led him to want to "do something important for humanity, to help keep people from physical and psychological and suffering, to overcome their limitations." That led him into his own investigations into life-extension technologies, and eventually to the avatar project. 

When we asked how much he planned to kick into the effort himself, Itskov declined say, or even to reveal how much he personally is worth. "It's interesting that I was called billionaire in the media," he says, "and actually I have never told the media anything like that." He called that characterization an exaggeration, but said that after founding two successful businesses he has enough money to fund the 2045 organization along with several research projects. "I will be announcing some startups in this field during the congress," he said. 

The lineup of speakers at the Global Future 2045 International Congress reads like a who's who in anthropomorphic robotics researchers and big thinkers about consciousness. These include Ray Kurzweil, prophet of the "singularity," in which humans will merge inseparably with our machines; MIT artificial intelligence scientist Marvin Minsky; quantum physicist Sir Roger Penrose; University of Southern California neuroprosthetics researcher Theodore Berger; and roboticists Hiroshi Ishiguro and David Hanson. An assortment of religious leaders and philosophers will attend Itskov's meeting, too. 

"We have to move to a higher stage of development through scientific revolution and through significant spiritual changes," Itskov says. "Natural selection doesn't work nowadays because of the development of medicine and technology."

Vvek's View: Already lot of research centers are working on creating machine that think and work! Already some futurist said we can Upload our mind by 2030 and some one said 2040 and so on... At present we are lagging in many ways to create such a stuff. For example, digitilization of brain, simply mind uploading, a fastest computer that can process all information equal to a human brain, a neural networked android!. But latest news says that scientists found almost every important things except the artificial brain of equal speed! They have even found the way to control the whole body by our mind!

Source : Internet

IBM Introduces World's Fastest Processor: 5.2GHz Enterprise Chip

               The new zEnterprise technology is the result of an investment of more than $1.5 billion in IBM research and development in the zEnterprise line, as well as more than three years of collaboration with some of IBM's top clients around the world. If you're into details, the z196 processor is a four-core chip that contains 1.4 billion transistors on a 512-square millimeter (mm) surface. It's manufactured using IBM's 45 nanometer (nm) SOI processor technology, and it makes use of IBM's patented embedded DRAM (eDRAM) technology, which allows IBM to place dense DRAM caches, or components, on the same chips as high-speed microprocessors, resulting in improved performance.

               The core server in the zEnterprise System -- called zEnterprise 196 -- contains 96 of the world's fastest, most powerful microprocessors, capable of executing more than 50 billion instructions per second. That's roughly 17,000 times more instructions than the Model 91, the high-end of IBM's popular System/360 family, could execute in 1970.

Vvek's View on Artificial Intelligence

                                  After a long period of exploring, I have concluded and need verification for what I have concluded. People like me, who are interested in exploring mind freaking facts about next generation computers, can follow this way of conclusion.

                                  There is lots and lots of Institutions, Universities, Research Laboratories are racing to achieving artificial intelligence, digitallization of human brain, mind uploading, whatever the name would be.... Simply we can say, Evolution of Human by digitalization. Lets see the Summary of this Blog.

Creating New

                               Creating a new whole brain is not such an easy process like launching a satellite in its orbit or like bombarding two nuclei and fuse to form a heavier nuclei in a fusion reactor. It will be a greatest of all achievement like, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert invented the first digital computer as a giant room sized machine on Feb. 14, 1946. As like the computer which that giant machine is shrined and made them more efficient, the core of a brain i.e. the super Processor! Up to  is being developed for a room sized racks of processors!! Simply we say Super Computers! Let us see, what are the possible ways to create such a processing device like the basic work of a Human Brain..

Neural network

                               Our brain is made of approximately 100 billion nerve cells, called neurons. Neurons have the amazing ability to gather and transmit electrochemical signals -- think of them like the gates and wires in a computer.

                               Neurons share the same characteristics and have the same makeup as other cells, but the electrochemical aspect lets them transmit signals over long distances (up to several feet or a few meters) and send messages to each other.

                        Like wise,  Neurogrid Super computer was deviced that trades the extreme precision of digital transistors for the brain's chaos of many neurons firing, with misfires 30 percent to 90 percent of the time. Yet the brain works with this messy system by relying on crowds of neurons to shout over the noise of misfires and competing signals.

                               That willingness to give up precision for chaos could lead to a new era of creative computing that simulates the unpredictable patterns of brain activity. It could also represent a far more energy-efficient era -- the Neurogrid fits in a briefcase and runs on what amounts to a few D batteries, or less than a watt. Rather than transistors, it uses capacitors that get the same voltage of neurons.

High Speed Processor

                              High speed processors are only used in Super Computers which have limited and peculiar applications such as Weather forecasting, Aerodynamic research, Probabilistic analysis, Radiation shielding modeling, Brute force code breaking, 3D nuclear test simulations as a substitute for legal conduct Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, and Molecular Dynamics Simulation.

                              Using 144 terabytes of RAM, scientists simulate a cat's cerebral cortex based on 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses, IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer Models a Cat's Entire Brain! The simulated cat brain still runs about 100 times slower than the real thing. But PhysOrg reports that a new algorithm called BlueMatter allows IBM researchers to diagram the connections among cortical and sub-cortical places within the human brain. The team then built the cat cortex simulation consisting of 1 billion brain cells and 10 trillion learning synapses, the communication connections among neurons. A separate team of Swiss researchers also used an IBM supercomputer for their Blue Brain project, where a digital rat brain's neurons began creating self-organizing neurological patterns. That research group hopes to simulate a human brain within 10 years.

Brain Simulating

                              Like before I said, Super computers consists of High speed processor is capable of process like brain atleast like a mouse's brain and nearer to a cat's brain can be used to simulate brain function and can create a model cat or atleast a mouse. But the problem is, these processors are made in huge sizes and these supercomputers are made as large number of racks and shelves! It should be first attain our brain's processing speed and it should be attain a compact size.

Program it from A to Z

                         

              If we can achieve a high speed processor, simulating the human's character is simple and it can be easily transferred into a large memory, like in Enthiran movie, the programs are named as "neural schema".

Developing the Old

                              Just imagine, there are lot of devices and machines discovered that work under our control like voice recognition devices, smart phones and other smart gadgets, artificial body parts like leg, Bionic-arm, etc.. If we can make a connection between our brain and electronic and electrical devices, why can't a Paralysed (disambiguation) person walk with a help of brain controlled Robotic-suite (suite like Iron man)??

Thought controlled Computers

                              Till now there are lot of commercial thought controlled computers are being used world wide. But, they are used only for entertaining purposes. 

Brain Controlled Devices

                        Only few people use such a technology like THIS  for some research purpose! and like THIS for some useful purpose.

Mind Uploading

                               By the help of BCI(Brain-Computer Interface), we can virtualize not only the monkeys environment, we can also virtualize and store the trace of some of our commands into a computer... Also See, BCI.