“You like your Tesla, but does your Tesla like you?” My new story for TechCrunch on robots understanding beauty and even whether they like your appearance or not:
Robots are starting to appear everywhere: driving cars, cooking dinners and even as robotic pets.
But people don’t usually give machine intelligence much credence when it comes to judging beauty. That may change with the launch of the world’s first international beauty contest judged exclusively by a robot jury.
The contest, which requires participants to take selfies via a special app and submit them to the contest website, is touting new sophisticated facial recognition algorithms that allow machines to judge beauty in new and improved ways.
The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the “wicked” problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, say researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University.
In an article published in the journal Science, the authors present a new vision of human computation (the science of crowd-powered systems), which pushes beyond traditional limits, and takes on hard problems that until recently have remained out of reach.
Humans surpass machines at many things, ranging from simple pattern recognition to creative abstraction. With the help of computers, these cognitive abilities can be effectively combined into multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot.
Futurism presents its annual This Year in Science immersive experience! This year’s themes include robot intelligence, space exploration, drones, CRISPR (a breakthrough gene editing tool), plus a special ‘Futurist of the Year’ award.
Better cameras, along with more powerful algorithms for computer vision and emotion-sensing facial analysis software, could transform the way we interact with our devices.
This came up recently and it occurred I never posted this here. This is a lecture by Robert Bradbury, not not Ray Bradbury. I had the pleasure of exchanging a few emails with him. Unfortunately those emails are lost so I cannot share them. He was an advocate of life extension and he was a big thinker. I’ll post both vids and a link to the M-brain page. He is not with us anymore I regret to say. Ready?
Renown aging expert Robert Bradbury discusses whole genome engineering, evolution and aging and ways to defeat aging. His talk touches on many areas including nanotechnology, biology, and computer science. More information can be found at http://manhattanbeachproject.com Follow updates at http://twitter.com/maxlifeorg
Disease GWAS show substantial genetic overlap with longevity. Shown are results for coronary artery disease and Alzheimer’s disease. The y axis is the observed P values for longevity, and the x axis is the expected P values under the null hypothesis that the disease is independent of longevity. The cyan, blue and purple lines show the P values for longevity of the top 100, 250, and 500 disease SNPs from independent genetic loci, respectively. Red lines show the background distribution of longevity P values for all independent genetic loci tested in both the longevity and disease GWAS. The grey horizontal line corresponds to the threshold for nominal significance (P = 0.05) for longevity. Significance of enrichment was determined with the hypergeometric test. (credit: Kristen Fortney et al./PLOS Genetics)
Color-coded heatmap of gradient of expression of the M1 gene network, spanning fetal development to late adulthood and expressed in distinct cortical regions (listed on right, such as primary somatosensory cortex, S1C). Most of the genes in this network express in cortical regions (indicated by red), except for the V1C (primary visual cortex), STR (striatum), CBC (cerebellar cortex), and MD (mediodorsal nucleus of thalamus) brain areas. (credit: Michael R. Johnson et al./Nature Neuroscience)
Scientists from Imperial College London have identified two clusters (“gene networks”) of genes that are linked to human intelligence. Called M1 and M3, these gene networks appear to influence cognitive function, which includes memory, attention, processing speed and reasoning.
Importantly, the scientists have discovered that these two networks are likely to be under the control of master regulator switches. The researcher want to identify those switches and see if they can manipulate them, and ultimately find out if this knowledge of gene networks could allow for boosting cognitive function.
Controlling the brain, consciousness and the unconscious through artificial means has long been a staple plot of science fiction. Yet history has a way of proving the fictional to end up as possible, and the future of brain-machine interface appears to hold greater promise than ever before.
Image Credit: Society for Neuroscience (SFN)
According to Neuroscience Researcher, Yale University Fellow, and the Director of Yale’s Clinical Neuroscience Imaging Center, Dr. Hal Blumenfeld, we can now therapeutically (and safely) go inside the brain. As he reflected on the recent advances in neuroscience, Blumenfeld cited the progress that’s been made in the last decade in understanding the relationship between brain activity and conscious thought as one of the biggest breakthroughs. The ability to find the switch in the brain that regulates consciousness, and turn it on and off, is a major step toward the treatment of epilepsy, brain injuries and more, and could have a profound effect on mankind, he said.
“I think the exciting advances are really looking in the network approach to understanding the brain, looking at the brain as a network, and understanding that, for something as wide reaching as consciousness to happen, you really need the whole brain network or most of the brain,” Blumenfeld said. “There’s a switch deep in the middle of the brain that can either be turned on or off. When that gets turned on, the whole rest of the brain network, including the cortex, all start to interact and create consciousness. When that switch gets flipped off, consciousness is turned down and we lose consciousness.”
While it sounds like a simple on/off operation, Blumenfeld noted that it’s not a smooth, linear process and that the different states of consciousness are subject to big jumps and rapid changes in the transition. Where researchers have made the biggest leaps, he said, is in gaining an understanding of those transitions and interactions throughout the entire network of the brain and how they regulate the level of arousal, attention and awareness.
Going forward, these breakthroughs could have a major effect in managing epileptic seizures, Blumenfeld said. While an epileptic seizure usually only affects one part of the brain, the seizure itself also flips that consciousness on/off switch to off. Avoiding that loss of consciousness during a seizure, he said, can also make the effects of the seizure milder and by extension, help improve the quality of life for those who suffer from epilepsy.
“The technology for deep brain stimulation has progressed fantastically in recent years, and it’s already being done for movement disorders, epilepsy and for chronic pain. (We have the technology to) safely implant in people’s brains a stimulator, like a pacemaker or a defibrillator, that detects when a seizure is happening and starts a stimulus,” Blumenfeld said. “Medicines and deep brain stimulation are not going to cure everyone of their seizures but, what this tells us is, there is another whole strategy we can take. Even if we can’t stop the seizures, if we can flip that switch back on so people will regain their consciousness during and after the seizure, they’ll be much better off.”
Beyond epilepsy, these new approaches in treatment can also be applied to those in a coma, those in a chronic vegetative state, and other disorders of consciousness, Blumenfeld said. These aren’t the only maladies being researched for brain stimulation. The use of optogenetics is also currently being studied for use in therapy and other brain disorders, he added. Ed Boyden and the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT are hard at work in this domain of research.
“I think optogenetics is tremendously exciting and will continue to grow. There are a lot of challenges to implementing it in humans and safely carrying it out, but the promise is there,” Blumenfeld said. “It has a much more selective mode of action with individual neurons and I believe that eventually, we’ll be able to use that too (in our research). It will just take a bit more time until we get to that point.”
Looking forward, Blumenfeld noted that the potential future applications of BMI and brain stimulation could one day expand to attention disorders and even the modulation of human emotion. However, owing to the ethical questions that will certainly arise, he feels a priority should remain on developing further treatments or therapies for those who need it the most.
“First and foremost, we’ve got to look at the benefits we’re talking about, for people who are really suffering and really have tremendously impacted quality of life because of unpredictable-at-any-time-losing consciousness due to seizure, not being able to drive or, worse, people who are in a vegetative state. I think these are very promising therapies,” Blumenfeld said. “While scientists and human beings always have to consider the implications of them being used inappropriately, I think that doesn’t diminish from the importance of moving forward and developing these treatments so that they can be used for the people who need them the most.”
Optogenetic laser light stimulation of the thalamus (credit: Jia Liu et al./eLife)
By flashing high-frequency (40 to 100 pulses per second) optogenetic lasers at the brain’s thalamus, scientists were able to wake up sleeping rats and cause widespread brain activity. In contrast, flashing the laser at 10 pulses per second suppressed the activity of the brain’s sensory cortex and caused rats to enter a seizure-like state of unconsciousness.
“We hope to use this knowledge to develop better treatments for brain injuries and other neurological disorders,” said Jin Hyung Lee, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology, neurosurgery, and bioengineering at Stanford University, and a senior author of the study, published in the open-access journal eLIFE.
China wants to be the leading force in manned space exploration, and is exploring sending people to the far side of the moon, Mars, asteroids, and further into deep space.
Becoming the second largest economy in the world and an emerging superpower of its own, China wishes to add deep space exploration into its achievement portfolio. Besides the ongoing moon exploration, its scientists are considering going deeper into the solar system, including Mars, asteroids, and even manned deep-space mission. Liu Jizhong, director of the lunar exploration program and space engineering center, pointed out that China has to be more pioneering, tackling problems such as high speed deep space exploration, energy and power generation, space robot development, and more. He also said that China must cooperate with others as space exploration is an undertaking shared by the entire human species.
China currently intends to explore the far side of the moon, something that has never been done before. It would require a relay satellite for communication and navigation on Lagrange point, where the satellite could orbit within the combined gravitational pull of the Earth-moon system, as said by Zhang Lihua of China Spacesat Co. While China believes that robots are critical to the mission, it also believes that these trips must be manned in order to effectively leverage human decision-making. China also says they are designing footed robots to explore asteroids and better understand their material composition.
