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.

Oak Ridge's new Titan supercomputer is the fastest in the world

          The Energy Department’s new supercomputer has been named the fastest in the world. According to the Top 500 list, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s latest flagship computer Titan leapfrogged other ultra-fast machines to the top spot, clocking in 17.59 sustained petaflops on Linpack's benchmark scale.

          The open science supercomputer has a theoretical peak performance of 20 petaflops, or a quadrillion calculations per second. The IBM-powered Sequoia dropped to second place with 16.32 petaflops.

Last year, the Department of Energy awarded Nvidia and Cray a $97 million contract to create the world’s fastest supercomputer -- and the investment has clearly paid off.

          'The nation that leads the world in high-performance computing will have an enormous competitive advantage across a broad range of sectors.'

                                                                                                                                                     - U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu

          Thanks to powerful technology first used to power video game consoles like the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, Titan is ten times more powerful than its predecessor, Jaguar. The ultrafast computer is powered by 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs, the company’s fastest accelerator ever and over 560,640 AMD processors, a surprise inclusion given that 76 percent of the supercomputers on the Top 500 list use Intel.

The Department of Energy now has five systems in the top 20 including Sequoia.

          “The nation that leads the world in high-performance computing will have an enormous competitive advantage across a broad range of sectors, including national defense, science and medicine, energy production, transmission and distribution, storm weather and climate prediction, finance, commercial product development, and manufacturing,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu.  

          “Titan joins the Department’s top-ranking supercomputers in equipping our nation’s researchers with the tools needed to keep the United States on the cutting edge of innovation.”

          The dizzying computing power will be used to simulate complex models of climate change and analyzing nuclear reactions and alternative energies, and developing the next generation of materials used to manufacture U.S. goods.

Courtesy : www.foxnews.com
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/11/12/oak-ridge-new-titan-supercomputer-is-fastest-in-world/#ixzz2F1me4Osz

"Bionic Arm" Technology from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago

This week, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago introduced the first woman to be fitted with its "bionic arm" technology. Claudia Mitchell, who had her left arm amputated at the shoulder after a motorcycle accident, can now grab a drawer pull with her prosthetic hand by thinking, "grab drawer pull." That a person can successfully control multiple, complex movements of a prosthetic limb with his or her thoughts opens up a world of possibility for amputees. The setup -- both surgical and technological -- that makes this feat possible is almost as amazing as the results of the procedure.

The "bionic arm" technology is possible primarily because of two facts of amputation. First, the motor cortex in the brain (the area that controls voluntary muscle movements) is still sending out control signals even if certain voluntary muscles are no longer available for control; and second, when doctors amputate a limb, they don't remove all of the nerves that once carried signals to that limb. So if a person's arm is gone, there are working nerve stubs that end in the shoulder and simply have nowhere to send their information. If those nerve endings can be redirected to a working muscle group, then when a person thinks "grab handle with hand," and the brain sends out the corresponding signals to the nerves that should communicate with the hand, those signals end up at the working muscle group instead of at the dead end of the shoulder.

Rerouting those nerves is not a simple task. Dr. Todd Kuiken of the RIC developed the procedure, which he calls "targeted muscle reinnervation." Surgeons basically dissect the shoulder to access the nerve endings that control the movements of arm joints like the elbow, wrist and hand. Then, without damaging the nerves, they redirect the endings to a working muscle group. In the case of the RIC's "bionic arm," surgeons attach the nerve endings to a set of chest muscles. It takes several months for the nerves to grow into those muscles and become fully integrated. The end result is a redirection of control signals: The motor cortex sends out signals for the arm and hand through nerve passageways as it always did; but instead of those signals ending up at the shoulder, they end up at the chest.

To use those signals to control the bionic arm, the RIC setup places electrodes on the surface of the chest muscles. Each electrode controls one of the six motors that move the prosthetic arm's joints. When a person thinks "open hand," the brain sends the "open hand" signal to the appropriate nerve, now located in the chest. When the nerve ending receives the signal, the chest muscle it's connected to contracts. When the "open hand" chest muscle contracts, the electrode on that muscle detects the activation and tells the motor controlling the bionic hand to open. And since each nerve ending is integrated into a different piece of chest muscle, a person wearing the bionic arm can move all six motors simultaneously, resulting in a pretty natural range of motions for the prosthesis.

Courtesy - " science.howstuffworks.com "

Then why can one create a Robot that is controlled by a human brain!!!

How to weave machinery into biology

As we’re starting to test artificially grown organs, scientists are wondering how to make sure that their methods result in viable tissues. One of the first steps was to take organ growth into three dimensions, letting the cells grow on a scaffold and self-organize into the right muscles, valves, and other soft tissue. Usually these scaffolds are derived from existing organs purified of all their old cells and many are designed to break down into naturally occurring chemicals to be flushed out of the body on implantation. But how do you check what the organ can be implanted with the necessary level of precision? Why turn the scaffold into a monitoring device by letting cells grow on a sensor. This way, when the tissues grow, you can monitor the electrical buzz between the cells and track how well they’re developing and working together. But so far, this method had a pretty sever limitation. It could only be done in two dimensions, one less than we need for viable organic structures. So much potential but so problematic to implement.

Well, researchers at MIT decided to tackle this problem and came up with a new biocompatible material that could be arranged into a proper three dimensional scaffold and monitor both the structure and function of an organ. After successfully growing cardiac muscles around a mesh of this electro-sensitive substance, they were able to monitor the effects of a chemical that speeds up heart rate. Using their method, we could obtain a treasure trove of new data about how well a future artificial organ will grow and run it through a battery of tests to make sure it’s fit for clinical use to replace a damaged or failing organ. Even more interesting would be the opportunity for doctors to keep monitoring how the organ is doing and give patients advance warning should a health crisis be imminent. Imagine a future in which your aging and failing vital organs could be replaced with wired versions of themselves and report on how well your body is doing, giving all sorts of useful warnings should something new go wrong. Better yet, the mesh would simply read the behavior of the cells around it and report it back to a system which can make sense of the detected patterns so there’s not delicate, over-engineered instrument sitting inside you.

And all that brings us to another question. Could nanoparticles made from this material hitch a ride through a patient’s bloodstream to the liver, lungs, heart, kidneys, possibly into some key parts of the musculoskeletal system, maybe even the brain itself (though that would be a major challenge in and of itself), and monitor his or her health by listening to the patterns of electrical signals emitted by the organs’ cells. Could be a path to early detection and treatment of cancer strains that grow into tumors when we learn how to track the electrochemical signs of a malicious cell being formed? The possibilities posed by this technology are really quite amazing and come with great potential for new medical markets. Let’s hope there will be a lot of follow up to see if it really would be possible to make us all cyborgs with internal biocompatible sensors that will help us better diagnose what ails us as our bodies accumulate wear and tear. It sounds an awful lot like a science fiction movie, true. But in this case, the technology is very real and we have some very good ideas out there for how to turn it into science fact with the right funding and expertise behind this invention’s spin-off projects.

See: Tian, B., et al. (2012). Macroporous nanowire nanoelectronic scaffolds for synthetic tissues Nature Materials DOI: 10.1038/nmat3404

Courtesy : Weird things

Monkeys use mind control to move a virtual arm and experience touch

The aim is to create a mind-controlled 'exoskeleton' that can restore movement and sensation to paralysed people

A brain implant allowed monkeys not only to move a virtual arm but also to experience tactile sensations. Photograph: Katie Zhuang

A brain implant that allows monkeys to move an avatar's arm and feel objects in a virtual world has been demonstrated for the first time.

The animals used the device to control the arm by thought alone, and feel the texture of the objects it touched through electrical signals sent directly to their brains.

Researchers built the system as part of a major effort to help paralysed people regain the use of their arms and legs, feeling the objects they touch and the ground they walk on.

Without any sensation of touch, it would be easy for people to crush or drop objects they were trying to grasp, or misjudge the terrain underfoot and stumble, the scientists said.

Miguel Nicolelis, who led the research team at Duke University in North Carolina, said the technology was a milestone in his group's bid to restore natural movement and fine control to paralysed people.

Nicolelis is working with colleagues at the Technical University in Munich to build a whole-body "exoskeleton" that can move people's paralysed limbs in response to brain activity picked up by the implant.

"The patient will be able to use their brain to control their movement, but they could also get sensations back from their legs, arms and hands," Nicolelis told the Guardian.

"We are looking to have a demonstration of this in time for the World Cup in 2014. When the Brazilian team walks on to the field, we want them accompanied by two quadriplegic teenagers who will walk on to the pitch and kick the ball using this technology."

Nicolelis, who was born in São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, said the challenge was "like the Brazilian moonshot".

While a prototype exoskeleton might be more conspicuous than most patients would like, it will be quiet and made of lightweight materials. "Even the first generation is not going to be like Robocop," Nicolelis said.

Writing in the journal Nature, Nicolelis describes a series of experiments in which monkeys learned to perform tasks on a computer in exchange for a reward, in this case a sip of fruit juice.

In the first round of experiments, the monkeys used a joystick to move a virtual arm on the computer screen in front of them. The screen displayed three identical images, each a circle within a circle. As the virtual hand moved over each, the joystick vibrated to convey one of three different "textures". Using trial and error, the monkeys worked out that they received some juice when they placed their virtual hand in the centre of a circle with a certain texture.

In the second round of experiments, the monkeys switched over to the brain implant. This time, they moved the virtual arm by thoughts, which were picked up by fine wires inserted into the motor cortex region of their brains. The electrical activity of between 50 and 200 brain cells controlled the arm's movements.

When the monkeys moved the virtual arm onto a circle, they experienced a sensation of texture from tiny electrical pulses sent directly to thousands of neurons in part of the brain called the primary tactile cortex.

The more time the monkeys spent with the implant, the more they appeared to view the virtual arm as a natural part of their body. "They got better and better at the task over time. By measuring how long they spent on each circle, you could see they were really focused on finding the right texture," Nicolelis said.

Nicolelis calls the device a brain-machine-brain interface, because it translates brain activity into movement while sending information on texture back into the brain.

"The remarkable success with nonhuman primates is what makes us believe that humans could accomplish the same task much more easily in the near future," Nicolelis said. "We hope that in the next few years this technology could help to restore a more autonomous life to many patients who are currently locked in without being able to move or experience any tactile sensation of the surrounding world."

Courtesy : http://www.guardian.co.uk

SCIENTISTS TO REVEAL GOD PARTICLE FINDINGS

By Genevieve Gannon, AAP

An experiment accused of jeopardising the future of the planet will reach its climax this week.

Scientists will on Wednesday reveal the findings of their investigation into the piece of sub-atomic matter dubbed the God particle.

There are three possible outcomes to the 30-year search for the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that is key to the scientific understanding of all matter.

The first outcome - they will prove its existence.

The rule book for how particles have mass operates under the assumption the Higgs boson exists.

The Higgs boson theory is a missing piece of the rule book, which would have to be rewritten or scrapped if scientists discover the particle doesn't exist.

The second outcome - they will find something previously unthought of.

The third outcome - they will be able to rule out the existence of the Higgs Boson altogether.

Melbourne University physicist Geoff Taylor, who has been involved in the Geneva project since 1989, says the significance of the experiment cannot be overstated.

"The existence or not of the Higgs is an absolutely pivotal moment," Prof Taylor said.

"For us it's an incredibly important step in understanding the universe around us."

Should the Higgs boson be discovered, scientists will be able to explore other mysterious phenomena such as dark matter.

Last week, physicists started analysing the data collected from the latest batch of experiments in Geneva.

Even they don't know what they will find.

"We know we have to discover something in this energy range," Prof Taylor said.

"The simplest thing would be the Standard Model Higgs."

The experiments having been taking place below the Geneva airport and surrounding farmland.

The Large Hadron Collider, which is housed in a 27 kilometre long tunnel, has been "smashing" particles together.

Data has then been collected from the sub-atomic fragments released by the collision.

Scientists have been analysing the data in a double-blind test, to minimise the interference of what Prof Taylor calls human foibles.

"We have to find one particular event in about a million million events," Prof Taylor says.

The experiment has previously met with opposition.

There were some who believed it could cause the end of the world because the smashing of the particles would result in the generation of mini black holes.

Prof Taylor dismissed the claims.

"As soon as you say there is the possibility of creating black holes you have people saying we are going to be swallowed up by black holes," Prof Taylor said in 2008.

"It's completely misguided."

An announcement will be made in Geneva and Melbourne at 6pm (AEST) on Wednesday.

"Whatever comes out comes out, we don't know what that will be yet," Prof Taylor said.

Google's 'brain simulator': 16000 computers to identify a cat

                                      Inside Google's secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain. There Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the internet to learn on its own.

Stanford computer scientist Andrew Ng next to an image of a cat that a neural network taught itself to recognise. Photo: The New York Times

Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google's brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats.

The neural network taught itself to recognise cats, which is actually no frivolous activity. This week the researchers will present the results of their work at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The Google scientists and programmers will note that while it is hardly news that the internet is full of cat videos, the simulation nevertheless surprised them. It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognising objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items.
The research is representative of a new generation of computer science that is exploiting the falling cost of computing and the availability of huge clusters of computers in giant data centers. It is leading to significant advances in areas as diverse as machine vision and perception, speech recognition and language translation.
Although some of the computer science ideas that the researchers are using are not new, the sheer scale of the software simulations is leading to learning systems that were not previously possible.
And Google researchers are not alone in exploiting the techniques, which are referred to as "deep learning" models. Last year Microsoft scientists presented research showing that the techniques could be applied equally well to build computer systems to understand human speech.
"This is the hottest thing in the speech recognition field these days," said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist who specialises in machine learning at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.

And then, of course, there are the cats.
To find them, the Google research team, lead by the Stanford University computer scientist Andrew Y. Ng and the Google fellow Jeff Dean, used an array of 16,000 processors to create a neural network with more than one billion connections. They then fed it random thumbnails of images, one each extracted from 10 million YouTube videos.

The videos were selected randomly and that in itself is an interesting comment on what interests humans in the internet age. However, the research is also striking. That is because the software-based neural network created by the researchers appeared to closely mirror theories developed by biologists that suggest individual neurons are trained inside the brain to detect significant objects.

Currently much commercial machine vision technology is done by having humans "supervise" the learning process by labeling specific features. In the Google research, the machine was given no help in identifying features.

"The idea is that instead of having teams of researchers trying to find out how to find edges, you instead throw a ton of data at the algorithm and you let the data speak and have the software automatically learn from the data," Dr. Ng said.

"We never told it during the training, 'This is a cat,' " said Dr. Dean, who originally helped Google design the software that lets it easily break programs into many tasks that can be computed simultaneously. "It basically invented the concept of a cat. We probably have other ones that are side views of cats."

The Google brain assembled a dreamlike digital image of a cat by employing a hierarchy of memory locations to successively cull out general features after being exposed to millions of images. The scientists said, however, that it appeared they had developed a cybernetic cousin to what takes place in the brain's visual cortex.

Neuroscientists have discussed the possibility of what they call the "grandmother neuron," specialised cells in the brain that fire when they are exposed repeatedly or "trained" to recognise a particular face of an individual.

"You learn to identify a friend through repetition," said Gary Bradski, a neuroscientist at Industrial Perception, in Palo Alto, Calif.
While the scientists were struck by the parallel emergence of the cat images, as well as human faces and body parts in specific memory regions of their computer model, Dr. Ng said he was cautious about drawing parallels between his software system and biological life.

"A loose and frankly awful analogy is that our numerical parameters correspond to synapses," said Dr. Ng. He noted that one difference was that despite the immense computing capacity that the scientists used, it was still dwarfed by the number of connections found in the brain.

"It is worth noting that our network is still tiny compared to the human visual cortex, which is 106 times larger in terms of the number of neurons and synapses," the researchers wrote.

Despite being dwarfed by the immense scale of biological brains, the Google research provides new evidence that existing machine learning algorithms improve greatly as the machines are given access to large pools of data.

"The Stanford/Google paper pushes the envelope on the size and scale of neural networks by an order of magnitude over previous efforts," said David A. Bader, executive director of high-performance computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. He said that rapid increases in computer technology would close the gap within a relatively short period of time: "The scale of modeling the full human visual cortex may be within reach before the end of the decade."

Google scientists said that the research project had now moved out of the Google X laboratory and was being pursued in the division that houses the company's search business and related services. Potential applications include improvements to image search, speech recognition and machine language translation.

Despite their success, the Google researchers remained cautious about whether they had hit upon the holy grail of machines that can teach themselves.

"It'd be fantastic if it turns out that all we need to do is take current algorithms and run them bigger, but my gut feeling is that we still don't quite have the right algorithm yet," said Dr. Ng.

The New York Times

Windows 8 Release Preview(Evaluation copy)

Its look like Microsoft also begins to distribute free apps and let us to develop a app like Linux distributions..... Microsoft clearly plans to overtake both Android and Linux by distributing free apps like open source!!!

The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)

The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables computer programmers (known as Requesters) to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. It is one of the suites of Amazon Web Services. The Requesters are able to post tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a store-front, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk's Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the more limited MTurk Requester site. Requestors are restricted to US-based entities.

Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker's reputation. Currently, Workers can have an address anywhere in the world. Payments for completing tasks can be redeemed on Amazon.com via gift certificate or be later transferred to a Worker's U.S. bank account. Requesters, which are typically businesses, pay 10 percent of the price of successfully completed HITs to Amazon.

CERN Officials May Have Witnessed ‘God Particle’

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. It belongs to a class of particles known as bosons, characterized by an integer value of their spin quantum number. The Higgs field is a quantum field with a non-zero value that fills all of space, and explains why fundamental particles such as quarks and electrons have mass. The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field above its ground state.

One possible signature of a Higgs boson from a simulated proton-proton collision. It decays almost immediately into two jets of hadrons and two electrons, visible as lines.

The existence of the Higgs boson is predicted by the Standard Model to explain how spontaneous breaking of electroweak symmetry (the Higgs mechanism) takes place in nature, which in turn explains why other elementary particles have mass. Its discovery would further validate the Standard Model as essentially correct, as it is the only elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model that has not yet been observed in particle physics experiments. The Standard Model completely fixes the properties of the Higgs boson, except for its mass. It is expected to have no spin and no electric or color charge, and it interacts with other particles through weak interaction and Yukawa interactions. Alternative sources of the Higgs mechanism that do not need the Higgs boson are also possible and would be considered if the existence of the Higgs boson were ruled out. They are known as Higgsless models.

Experiments to determine whether the Higgs boson exists are currently being performed using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and were performed at Fermilab's Tevatron until its closure in late 2011. Mathematical consistency of the Standard Model requires that any mechanism capable of generating the masses of elementary particles become visible at energies above 1.4 TeV; therefore, the LHC (designed to collide two 7-TeV proton beams) is expected to be able to answer the question of whether or not the Higgs boson actually exists. In December 2011, Fabiola Gianotti and Guido Tonelli, spokespersons of the two main experiments at the LHC (ATLAS and CMS) both reported independently that their data hints at a possibility the Higgs may exist with a mass around 125 GeV/c2 (about 133 proton masses, on the order of 10−25 kg). They also reported that the original range under investigation has been narrowed down considerably and that a mass outside approximately 115–130 GeV/c2 is almost ruled out. No conclusive answer yet exists, although it is expected that the LHC will provide sufficient data by the end of 2012 for a definite answer.

"Discovery or exclusion of the Higgs particle, as predicted by the Standard Model, is getting ever closer," CERN Director for Research and Scientific Computing, Sergio Bertolucci, said in a statement. "Both occurrences will be great news for physics, the former allowing us to start the detailed study of the Higgs particle, the latter being the first proof of the incompleteness of the Standard Model, requiring new phenomena to be happening within the reach of the LHC."

"We’re taking our first steps in this new physics landscape," added CMS experiment spokesman Guido Tonelli, "and it is great to see how fast we are producing new results. I am confident that soon there will be only a few regions left where the Higgs boson, as postulated by the Standard Model, might still be hiding."

Source: redOrbit (http://s.tt/160nr)

Transhumanism

Neuroscientist Anders Sandberg has an interesting career: he's working on uploading the contents of human brains onto a computer. This would be important, he explains, to combat aging as well as overpopulation.

Illustration by Michael Gibbs: a secular icon representing transhumanism

At a meeting of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) held in Chicago this past July, "Transvision 2007," Sandberg and other transhumanists from around the world got together to talk about the future of humanity ("transhumanism" means, literally, "beyond humanity").

In pursuit of his goal of creating human-machine hybrids, Sandberg described how to scan a mouse brain, using a camera, a laser beam and a diamond blade. Conceivably, with their brain hosted by a computer, a person could live indefinitely.

More pragmatically, AI member Marvin Minsky, a pioneer of artificial neural networks and co-founder of the AI lab at MIT, explains why humanity would want this. "Ordinary citizens wouldn't know what to do with eternal life," Minsky explained to Egan. "The masses don't have any clear-cut goals or purpose." But scientists, who work on problems that might take decades to solve, would appreciate the extended lifespans, he says.

According to the Transvision Web site , the WTA has a foundation of seemingly non-controversial principles: for instance, they support the development of new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy "better minds, better bodies and better lives." Their goals are ambitious, yet common: they seek to solve nothing less than the greatest challenges that humanity will face. They look for solutions including longevity therapies, sustainable energy, clean water, a restored environment, and space development.

The science and technology they consider using is the most striking part of transhumanist thought, although much of it is abstract and theoretical. Often with the intent to modify the human body, transhumanists employ ideas and tools from biotechnology, information technology, cognitive science, simulated reality, artificial intelligence, and more futuristic disciplines. Because they deal with technologies far from today's lab bench, many "traditional" scientists are skeptical of the technical feasibility of transhumanist science.

Best-seller by Ray Kurzweil, WTA's unofficial prophet

Sometimes the transhumanists are accused of lacking ethical boundaries for their work, but the WTA actually is quite interested in ethics, morality and civil liberties, albeit with their own definitions. For example, a transhumanist thought is that humans can and should use technology to become more than human -- ethically worded, at least.

"Sooner or later someone is going to create these technologies," says AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky on the need to move forward before someone with malevolent intentions or ethical ignorance does first. "If a self-improving AI is thrown together in a slapdash fashion, we could be in for big trouble."

(If that's not an ethical understatement, what is?)

On the other hand, Minsky represents another perspective of transhumanist ethics. The 80-year-old father of AI, who is strongly against regulating the development of new technologies, told Egan, "Scientists shouldn't have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want. You shouldn't ask them to have the same values as other people."
...And, it seems, transhumanists don't seem to mind a little controversy.

Further information:
New Scientist video interview with WPA members

Prototype Nano Assembler

This is not what you'd normally expect to see in a press release from a U.S. government scientist:

The first real steps towards building a microscopic device that can construct nano machines have been taken by US researchers. Writing in [a] peer-reviewed publication, researchers describe an early prototype for a nanoassembler.

In his 1986 book, The Engines of Creation, K. Eric Drexler set down the long-term aim of nanotechnology -- to create an assembler, a microscopic device, a robot, that could construct yet smaller devices from individual atoms and molecules.

For the last two decades, those researchers who recognized the potential have taken diminutive steps towards such a nanoassembler. Those taking the top-down approach have seen the manipulative power of the atomic force microscope (AFM), a machine that can observe and handle single atoms, as one solution. Those taking the bottom-up approach are using chemistry to build molecular machinery.

However, neither the top-down nor the bottom-up approach is yet to fulfill Drexler's prophecy of functional nanobots that can construct other machines on a scale of just a few billionths of a meter. . .

Yet the rewards could be enormous with the ultimate potential of creating a technology that can construct almost any material from atoms and molecules from super-strong but incredibly lightweight construction materials to a molecular computer or even nanobots that can make other nanobots to solve global problems, such as food, water, and energy shortages.

Jason Gorman, contact person on the announcement, is with the Intelligent Systems Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Here's more from the release:

Gorman and his colleagues at NIST have taken a novel approach to building a nanoassembler and reveal details in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Nanomanufacturing. "Our demonstration is still a work in progress," says Gorman, "you might describe it as a 'proto-prototype' for a nanoassembler."

The NIST system consists of four Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) devices positioned around a centrally located port on a chip into which the starting materials can be placed Each nanomanipulator is composed of positioning mechanism with an attached nanoprobe. By simultaneously controlling the position of each of these nanoprobes, the team can use them to cooperatively assemble a complex structure on a very small scale. "If successful, this project will result in an on-chip nanomanufacturing system that would be the first of its kind," says Gorman. . .

Importantly, once the team has optimized their design they anticipate that nanoassembly systems could be made for around $400 per chip at present costs. This is thousands of times cheaper than macro-scale systems such as the AFM.

Gorman points out that it should be possible to have multiple nanoassemblers working simultaneously to manufacture next generation nanoelectronics. At the moment, his team is interested in developing the platform for scientists and engineers to make cutting edge discoveries in nanotechnology. "Very few effective tools exist for manipulation and assembly at the nano-scale, thereby limiting the growth of this critical field," he says.

Assuming this concept can be put into practice, as Gorman and his team expect, it will represent a significant step forward in enabling technologies for molecular manufacturing. It's not all the way there, of course. In fact, several more steps will be required, which may take at least another five to ten years.

But this is an important advance, especially since it comes from within the U.S. scientific community, which up until now has been largely dismissive of molecular manufacturing theory.

IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer

IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer Models a Cat's Entire Brain

Using 144 terabytes of RAM, scientists simulate a cat's cerebral cortex based on 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses

Cats may retain an aura of mystery about their smug selves, but that could change with scientists using a supercomputer to simulate the the feline brain. That translates into 144 terabytes of working memory for the digital kitty mind.

IBM and Stanford University researchers modeled a cat's cerebral cortex using the Blue Gene/IP supercomputer, which currently ranks as the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world. They had simulated a full rat brain in 2007, and 1 percent of the human cerebral cortex this year.

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.

Another more radical approach from Stanford University looks to recreate the human brain's messily chaotic system on a small device called Neurogrid. Unlike traditional supercomputers with massive energy requirements, Neurogrid might run on the human brain's power requirement of just 20 watts -- barely enough to run a dim light bulb.

http://www.popsci.com/