NeuroGrid — A Circuit Board Modeled after the Human Brain
Although the basic computer architecture we rely on was designed to handle math and logic problems, it’s done a bang-up job of tackling everything from word processing and socializing to controlling the movements of artificial limbs. But as we demand increasingly human-like work from machines, pressure is mounting to rejigger and expand their basic architecture to better jibe with the brain’s way of doing things.
If we ever want to be able to run a computer that simulates the hundred billion neurons at work in a human brain, though, each of its silicon chips will have to sip, not gulp, energy. And while computers will have to process information through pathways more organic and complex than the classic von Neumann architecture, they will have to keep up a demanding pace.
Eying those problems on the horizon, a team ofStanford University engineers led by Kwabena Boahen has developed a circuit board, and its underlying chips, that simulates the activity of a million neurons 9,000 times faster than a personal computer could and is 100,000 times more energy efficient. They reported the findings in a recent issue of IEEE.
The circuit board, called Neurogrid, consists of 16 custom-designed Neurocore chips. Each chip simulates 65,536 neurons. All told, the board can simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synaptic connections.
A Visionary 3-D Printed Chair That You Can Download Now
Joris Laarman doesn’t work out of a studio so much as a laboratory. The Dutch designer, probably best known for his chair that mimics the growth of human bones, has always claimed dual citizenship in the worlds of classic design and science. “I like to take things out of the scientific world and create something beautiful with it,” he says one day walking around the Friedman Benda Gallery in New York City.
Laarman recently opened up a new exhibition at gallery called Bits and Crafts. And much like his Bone Chair, the new works have an interesting, quasi-craftsmanship aesthetic to it, as though they were born from an affair between a carpenter and a computer scientist.
The centerpiece of the show, the Maker Chairs, is one of Laarman’s most ambitious projects yet: A set of algorithmically-designed chairs that can be printed out and constructed like a puzzle. The furniture looks vaguely like Verner Panton’s injection-molded chair from 1960 if it were reimagined by mathematicians.
Last November, equipped with two 3D printers, a few days’ intensive training, and a digital schematic for a 3D printed prosthetic arm, Mick Ebeling flew to war-torn Sudan to find Daniel Omar. Daniel had lost both his arms in a Sudanese government airstrike two years earlier. Now, Daniel has a brand new custom 3D printed arm.
We often write about 3D printing and how, combined with other computer-assisted technologies, it might remake the industrial landscape, but rarely does the tech’s impact seem so immediate and clear.
Using naught but string, a lump of plastic, a computer, and a 3D printer—Ebeling manufactured a simple, functional prosthetic arm in a refugee camp in rural Sudan. It’s not Luke Skywalker, but it’s a significant improvement over the alternative.
There are two beginnings to this story.
Ebeling founded Not Impossible Labs to tackle audacious projects with big positive impacts—naïveté, he says, is the key to innovation. One of Ebeling’s first endeavors was a communications device called Eyewriter for Tempt One, a graffiti artist paralyzed with ALS. Eyewriter translated Tempt’s eye movements into an onscreen painting.
Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved — soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they're made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain's 100,000,000,000,000 synapses.
Henry Markram plans to build a virtual model of a human brain. A neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he believes the only way to truly understand how our brains work — and why they often don't — is to create a replica out of 1s and 0s, then subject it to a barrage of computer-simulated experiments.
Markram has established the Human Brain Project to do just that. The effort aims to integrate all aspects of the human brain that have been discovered by neuroscientists over the past few decades, from the structures of ion channels to the mechanisms of conscious decision-making, into a single supercomputer model: a virtual brain. The project, which is controversial among neuroscientists, has been selected as a finalist for the European Union's two new Flagship Initiatives — grants worth 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) apiece.
Watson, IBM's supercomputer made famous three years ago for beating the very best human opponents at a game of Jeopardy, now comes with an impressive new feature. When asked to discuss any topic, it can autonomously scan its knowledge database for relevant content, "understand" the data, and argue both for and against that topic.
Watson's DeepQA is arguably the world's best computer system at natural language processing by a wide margin, which is an extraordinarily complex field of artificial intelligence. Perhaps the major difficulty in understanding human language is the lack of "common sense" in today's computers. For all its number-crunching power, Watson cannot "understand" the questions it is asked, at least not in a traditional sense. The way in which Watson answers questions is closer to symbol manipulation than to the way you and I understand and process information, but the end results are often impressive.
Watson looks at the question it is being asked and groups words together, finding statistically related phrases. Thanks to a massively parallel architecture, it then simultaneously uses thousands of language analysis algorithms to sift through its database of 15 terabytes of human knowledge and find the correct answer. The more algorithms find the same answer independently, the more a certain answer is likely to be correct. This is how, back in 2011, it managed to win a game of Jeopardy against two human champions.
In a presentation at the the Milken Institute Global Conference, IBM senior vice president and director of research John Kelly III demonstrated how Watson can now list, without human assistance, what it believes are the most valid arguments for and against a topic of choice. In other words, it can now debate for or against any topic, in natural language.
Bolte Taylor's personal experience with a massive stroke, experienced in 1996 at the age of 37, and her subsequent eight-year recovery, has informed her work as a scientist and speaker. For this work, in May 2008 she was named to Time Magazine's 2008 Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.[1] "My Stroke of Insight" received the top "Books for a Better Life" Book Award in the Science category from the New York City Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society on February 23, 2009 in New York City. (Wikipedia)
Smart machines: What's the worst that could happen?
15:38 27 July 2009 by MacGregor Campbell
For similar stories, visit the Computer crime and Robots Topic Guides
An invasion led by artificially intelligent machines. Conscious computers. A smartphone virus so smart that it can start mimicking you. You might think that such scenarios are laughably futuristic, but some of the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are concerned enough about the potential impact of advances in AI that they have been discussing the risks over the past year. Now they have revealed their conclusions.
TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE Solar-Powered Roads Light Up
You think two people can’t make a difference? Just take a look at Sandpoint, Id., couple Julie and Scott Brusaw. She works as a counselor and he works as an electrical engineer. Julie wondered why couldn’t someone just turn all of the roads and parking lots into solar panels to harvest sunlight, convert it in electricity? She asked her husband who admits he poo-poo’ed the idea at first, but it kept nagging at him. Yeah, why couldn’t someone do that? And hell, why couldn’t that someone be them?
What Happens When a Neurosurgeon Removes Your Hippocampus
Until the past few decades, neuroscientists had one way to plumb the human brain: wait for disaster to strike people and, if the victims pulled through, see how their minds worked differently afterward.
These poor men and women endured strokes, seizures, saber gashes, botched surgeries, and accidents so horrific that their survivals seemed little short of miracles. To say these people “survived,” though, doesn’t quite capture the truth. Their bodies survived, but their minds didn’t quite; their minds were warped into something new.
Some people lost all fear of death; others started lying incessantly; a few became pedophiles. But however startling, in one way these transformations proved predictable, since people with the same deficit tended to have damage in the same area of the brain—offering vital clues about what those areas did.
There are a thousand and one such stories in neuroscience. These tales expand our notions of what the brain is capable of, and show that when one part of the mind shuts down, something new and unpredictable and sometimes even beautiful roars to life.
Stephen Hawking: AI Could be ‘Worst Mistake in History’
Stephen Hawking, the world’s most famous physicist, has issued a warning about artificial intelligence (AI), saying it could be “the biggest event in human history,” but also “the last.”
In an op-ed published in The Independent, Hawking and three other scientists write it would be the “worst mistake in history” to dismiss the threat of AI, and that not enough research is being devoted to the possible risks involved. The op-ed cites several achievements in the field of AI, including self-driving cars, Siri and the computer that won Jeopardy! However, “such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring.”
Illustris computer simulation creates the first realistic virtual universe
As you might expect, the scale and complexities of the underlying physics means creating a realistic virtual universe would require some hefty computing power. A team of astronomers is claiming to have achieved this impressive feat using a computer simulation called "Illustris," which took five years to program and, for the first time, can recreate the evolution of the Universe in high fidelity.
