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Even the simplest networks of neurons in the brain are composed of millions of connections, and examining these vast networks is critical to understanding how the brain works. An international team of researchers, led by R. Clay Reid, Wei Chung Allen Lee and Vincent Bonin from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Harvard Medical School and Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF), respectively, has published the largest network to date of connections between neurons in the cortex, where high-level processing occurs, and have revealed several crucial elements of how networks in the brain are organized. The results are published in the journal Nature.

“This is a culmination of a research program that began almost ten years ago. Brain networks are too large and complex to understand piecemeal, so we used high-throughput techniques to collect huge data sets of brain activity and brain wiring,” says R. Clay Reid, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “But we are finding that the effort is absolutely worthwhile and that we are learning a tremendous amount about the structure of networks in the brain, and ultimately how the brain’s structure is linked to its function.”

Continue reading “Research on largest network of cortical neurons to date” »

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Welcome to Beauty.AI, the first beauty contest judged by an all-robot jury. Robots and humans are welcome to join.

You know that scene in the classic film Bruce Almighty when Jim Carrey uses his God-like powers to mess with Steve Carrell’s character while he’s giving a live news broadcast? That’s what this video looks like (kind of), except replace Steve Carrell for George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Barack Obama, and Jim Carrey for a team of wily researchers.

The system was designed by researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Max-Planck-Institude for Informatics, and Stanford University. The same team worked on a similar facial expression transfer project last year, but that involved controlling the expressions of someone in the same room. This time they’re doing it with YouTube videos. First, the “target actor” (that’s Bush, Trump, Putin, and Obama) is rendered with a neutral expression. Then, the expressions of the source actor (that’s the other guy) are captured via webcam, and those expressions control the animation in the YouTube video.

Continue reading “Watch a man manipulate George Bush’s face in real time” »

Deep neural networks (DNNs) can be taught nearly anything, including how to beat us at our own games. The problem is that training AI systems ties up big-ticket supercomputers or data centers for days at a time. Scientists from IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center think they can cut the horsepower and learning times drastically using “resistive processing units,” theoretical chips that combine CPU and non-volatile memory. Those could accelerate data speeds exponentially, resulting in systems that can do tasks like “natural speech recognition and translation between all world languages,” according to the team.

So why does it take so much computing power and time to teach AI? The problem is that modern neural networks like Google’s DeepMind or IBM Watson must perform billions of tasks in in parallel. That requires numerous CPU memory calls, which quickly adds up over billions of cycles. The researchers debated using new storage tech like resistive RAM that can permanently store data with DRAM-like speeds. However, they eventually came up with the idea for a new type of chip called a resistive processing unit (RPU) that puts large amounts of resistive RAM directly onto a CPU.

Annual sales of drones in the U.S. will hit 2.5 million this year and swell to 7 million by 2020, according to a projection from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Unmanned aircraft purchases are growing both for hobbyists and for commercial ventures that perform inspections, assist farmers, and survey construction sites, according to the agency’s annual forecast of aviation activity, released on Thursday.

The development of the logic gate had long been a stumbling block in the creation of functional quantum computers.

Scientists discover a family of nature-inspired polymers that, when placed in water, spontaneously assemble into nanotubes.

VIDEO: You don’t need a spaceship to rocket through space.