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Blog – Page 1410

For our final feature celebrating Women’s History Month, we interviewed Chiara Bartolozzi, a senior researcher moving the needle in neuromorphic engineering.

Every year for Women’s History Month, All About Circuits spotlights the contributions of distinguished women engineers worldwide. For this article, we interviewed Chiara Bartolozzi, a senior researcher and neuromorphic chip expert at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT).

Since earning a degree in engineering from the University of Genova and a Ph.D. in neuroinformatics from ETH Zurich, Bartolozzi has led important research in neuromorphic engineering. She also helped design iCub, a toddler-sized humanoid robot developed at IIT that serves as a robotics testbed worldwide.

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Researchers have made a digital map showing a tiny chunk of a human brain in unprecedented detail.

Based on a brain tissue sample that had been surgically removed from a person, the map represents a cubic millimeter of brain—an area about half the size of a grain of rice. But even that tiny segment is overflowing with 1.4 million gigabytes of information—containing about 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels and 150 million synapses, the connections between neurons.

The researchers published their findings in the journal Science on Friday. They have made the data set freely available online and provided tools for analyzing and proofreading it.

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Gary Marcus’ book Kluge is about the human brain and its workings. And I have been interested in how the brain works since my undergratuate days at Allegheny College working with Pete Elias and researching the learning of mice (1968) and especially into my doctoral work with Dick King at UNC-Chapel Hill. I actually think there is only modest improvement in some aspects of what we have learned about the brain since I graduated in 1977.

But we have come a long way… In ancient Greece, thinkers like Hippocrates and Aristotle grappled with the nature of the mind and its connection to the brain. While Hippocrates believed that the brain was the seat of intelligence and consciousness, Aristotle argued that the heart was the center of reason and emotion, with the brain serving merely as a cooling mechanism. We now know that the brain actually does have some impacts on thinking for most people. (grin)

I thought to share the AI book summary produced by Perplexity when I asked it to summarize the main ideas about how the brain evolved to produce this thing we can consciousness… I slightly edited the output. As Spock would say, “Fascinating.”

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Scientists have produced an enhanced, ultra-pure form of silicon that allows the construction of high-performance qubit devices. This fundamental component is crucial for paving the way towards scalable quantum computing.

The finding, published in the journal Communications Materials – Nature, could define and push forward the future of quantum computing.

The research was led by Professor Richard Curry from the Advanced Electronic Materials group at The University of Manchester, in collaboration with the University of Melbourne in Australia.

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A collaborative research team from NIMS and Tokyo University of Science has successfully developed a cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) device that executes brain-like information processing through few-molecule reservoir computing. This innovation utilizes the molecular vibrations of a select number of organic molecules. By applying this device for the blood glucose level prediction in patients with diabetes, it has significantly outperformed existing AI devices in terms of prediction accuracy.

With the expansion of machine learning applications in various industries, there’s an escalating demand for AI devices that are not only highly computational but also feature low-power consumption and miniaturization. Research has shifted towards physical reservoir computing, leveraging physical phenomena presented by materials and devices for neural information processing. One challenge that remains is the relatively large size of the existing materials and devices.

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