Posted in education, internet, mobile phones, robotics/AI
Teleport is a telepresence robot that can be used by people with a disability to attend school or work remotely. It can be controlled using an internet browser, Android phone, and now brain control.
Many who worked closely with me at Microsoft use to say I had a Crystal ball and was psychic; maybe I have met my match for a career — LOL.
A number of job adverts suggest that Facebook is taking social networking to a different level of science fiction.
The social networking giant has advertised for a Haptics Engineer, a Neural Imaging Engineer, a Signal Processing Engineer and a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Engineer – leading people to think Facebook is working on mind reading technology.
This is supported by each of the job descriptions. The roles are based in Facebook’s elusive ‘Building 8’ in California, where the team will “apply DARPA-style breakthrough development at the intersection of ambitious science and product development.”
That’s been the plan for a while.
The Pentagon’s Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA), the agency responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military, has facilitated the development of a robotic system to take over flying duties from military pilots. According to DARPA, the program, known as Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) was to produce “a tailorable, drop-in, removable kit that would promote the addition of high levels of automation into existing aircraft, enabling operation with reduced onboard crew.”
Last month, the system was successfully tested in three different models of military aircraft, a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter, a Diamond DA-42 aircraft, and two Cessna 208 Caravan aircraft. The testing also included ground demonstrations of the system responding to simulated system failures. These demonstrations also proved that the installation and removal of the system did not damage the vehicles.
Posted in transportation
Very cool.
Scientists have developed a new 5D technique for analysing images, an advance that may make it easier to quickly find tell-tale signs of diseases from pictures taken using cell phones. Called “Hyper-Spectral Phasor” analysis, or HySP, it is much faster and far less expensive than current techniques, and may be useful for diagnosing and monitoring diseases by using cell phone images, researchers said.
Through the new imaging technology, researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) in the US have used fluorescent imaging to locate proteins and other molecules in cells and tissues. It works by tagging the molecules with dyes that glow under certain kinds of light – the same principle behind so-called “black light” images.
Fluorescent imaging can help scientists understand which molecules are produced in large amounts in cancer or other diseases, information that may be useful in diagnosis or in identifying possible targets for therapeutic drugs.
Posted in computing, neuroscience
But, the larger question remains as to how these individual dendrites and neuron outputs are used by the circuit and the brain as a whole. These findings are considerably different than sequences needing a group of neurons working in order and in a circuit. Even more unusual is the fact that (even young childrens’) brains are able to analyze and respond to information that is, in fact, so complex that the most advanced super computers cannot. Can individual cells do this as well?
Another new set of research shows that in a monkey brain, these responses of individual neurons are correlated somewhat with the final decision of the animal. This research used very limited visual information and showed that the final decisions of the animal using billions of neurons was perhaps relevant even to this small amount of information input given to individual cells.
It could be that the local neuron responded to the decision that was made by the larger circuits and brain. But, it doesn’t answer the question as to how the individual neuron relates to the brain.
