more about "Lawrence Lessig Speaks Once Again Abo…", posted with vodpod

Web 2.0 Expo NY 09: Douglas Rushkoff

IBM has announced significant progress toward creating a computer system that simulates and emulates the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, while rivaling the brain's low power and energy consumption and compact size.The cognitive computing team, led by IBM Research, has achieved significant advances in large-scale cortical simulation and a new algorithm that synthesizes neurological data — two major milestones that indicate the feasibility of building a cognitive computing chip.Scientists, at IBM Research-Almaden, in collaboration with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. The announcement was made at SC 09, the supercomputing conference, being held in Portland, Oregon.

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The algorithm, when combined with the cortical simulator, allows scientists to experiment with various mathematical hypotheses of brain function and structure of how structure affects function as they work toward discovering the brain’s core computational micro and macro circuits.

After the successful completion of Phase 0, IBM and its university partners were recently awarded $16.1Min additional funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 1 of DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative. This phase of research will focus on the components, brain-like architecture and simulations to build a prototype chip. The long-term mission of IBM’s cognitive computing initiative is to discover and demonstrate the algorithms of the brain and deliver low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence and use significantly less energy than today’s computing systems. The world-class team includes researchers from several of IBM’s worldwide research labs and scientists from Stanford University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center and University of California- Merced.

“The goal of the SyNAPSE program is to create new electronics hardware and architecture that can understand, adapt and respond to an informative environment in ways that extend traditional computation to include fundamentally different capabilities found in biological brains,” said DARPA program manager Todd Hylton, Ph.D.

Modern computing is based on a stored program model, which has traditionally been implemented in digital, synchronous, serial, centralized, fast, hardwired, general-purpose circuits with explicit memory addressing that indiscriminately over-write data and impose a dichotomy between computation and data. In stark contrast, cognitive computing — like the brain — will use replicated computational units, neurons and synapses that are implemented in mixed-mode analog-digital, asynchronous, parallel, distributed, slow, reconfigurable, specialized and fault-tolerant biological substrates with implicit memory addressing that only update state when information changes, blurring the boundary between computation and data.

For more information about IBM Research, please visit www.ibm.com/research.

Technical insight and more details on the SyNAPSE project and recent milestones can also be found on the Cognitive Computing blog at http://modha.org/.

via Cat brain-based computer: Scientists perform cat-scale cortical simulations and map the human brain.

Highly interesting program on language and talking – the most definitive observable activity that defines us as humans.

 

 

Philip K Dick was brought back to life as a fully autonomous conversational android.

A team of roboticists, computer scientists, designers, and science fiction fans built a “robotic portrait” of the sci-fi author. The project was a collaboration between Hanson Robotics, the University of Memphis, and the Automation and Robotics Research Institute (ARRI) at the University of Texas, Arlington. The android used cameras to track visitors and turn to face them while talking. It used speech recognition and speech synthesis software to listen and respond, and AI routines that drew on Dick's body of work to hold a natural conversation with visitors.

The project is an unparalleled technical demonstration as well as a unique and strong work of art. With an artificial intelligence based persona based on the life and works of Philip K. Dick, the robot depicts the author with stunning accuracy. Using cameras in his eyes, the Android is able to recognize individuals in a crowd and can carry on conversations.

via The Philip K Dick Android Project.

“Darwins Brave New World is the story of how four young voyagers to the southern hemisphere, Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace revolutionised science and gave birth to an extraordinary theory about the evolution of life on earth.

Featuring a cast of Australian and Canadian actors and commentators such as controversial author and Oxford academic, Richard Dawkins, the Canadian scientist and broadcaster, David Suzuki and Australian scholar and author, Iain McCalman, from the University of Sydney, this brilliant drama-documentary tells the story of Charles Darwins struggle to produce one of the greatest scientific
theories of our age and the roles played in it by Hooker, Huxley and Wallace – Darwins fellow voyagers to the southern hemisphere.”

Playlist: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list…

Aired 11-8-09

Facial micro-expressions last less than a second and are almost impossible to control. They are hard wired to the emotional activity in the brain which can be easily captured using specially developed technological devices. Free will is now in question as science exposes decision-making as an emotional process rather than a rational one.This ability to read emotions technologically could result in a society obsessed with emotional reactions. Emotions, convictions and beliefs, which usually remain hidden, now become a public matter. Belief systems’ is a video scenario about a society that responds to the challenges of modern neuroscience by embracing these technological possibilities to read, evaluate and alter people’s behaviors and emotions.

Exhibit at the WHAT IF… Exhibition in the Science Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin in 2009
Belief Systems, 2009 by Bernhard Hopfengärtner

more about "Eliezer Yudkowsky at Singularity Summ…", posted with vodpod

For tens of thousands of years our ancestors understood the world through myths, and the pace of change was glacial. The rise of scientific understanding transformed the world within a few centuries. Why? Physicist David Deutsch proposes a subtle answer.

Lawrence Krauss gives a talk on our current picture of the universe, how it will end, and how it could have come from nothing. Krauss is the author of many bestselling books on Physics and Cosmology, including “The Physics of Star Trek.”

Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots – the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words like “control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. “Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking…a whole system is a living system is a learning system,” as Stewart Brand put it in 1980. Cybernetic systems have been used to model all kinds of phenomena, with varying degrees of success – factories, societies, machines, ecosystems, brains — and many noted artists and musicians derived inspiration from this powerful conceptual toolkit. Cybernetics may be one of the most interdisciplinary frameworks ever devised; its theories link engineering, math, physics, biology, psychology, and an array of other fields, and ideas from cybernetics inevitably infiltrated the arts. The musician and producer Brian Eno, for example, was a big fan of connecting ideas from cybernetics to the studio environment, and to music composition, in his work in the 1970s.

Eno was first exposed to concepts in cybernetics as a teenager in the mid-1960s, during his days as a student at Ipswich Art College. Several art schools in the UK in the ’60s were incorporating ideas from cybernetics into their pedagogical approaches, mainly via Roy Ascott’s infamous “Groundcourse” curriculum. Ipswich Art College, where Eno studied in the mid-’60s, was run by Ascott, an imposing presence who incorporated cutting-edge cybernetics principles into his offbeat teaching style. Before Ipswich, Ascott had been head tutor at Ealing, a nearby art school where a young Pete Townshend was studying. “The first term at Ipswich was devoted entirely to getting rid of those silly ideas about the nobility of the artist by a process of complete and relentless disorientation,” Eno recalled some ten years later, in a guest lecture he gave at Trent Polytechnic. Ascott’s teaching philosophy involved countless mandatory group collaboration exercises — an echo of cybernetics’ emphasis on “systems learning” — and mental games. Very little of the teaching at Ipswich had anything to do with what the teenage Eno had ostensibly set out to do — study the fine arts. Instead of daubing canvases with oil paints, Eno and his fellow students were instructed to create “mindmaps” of each other.

continue reading via Rhizome | Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics.

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.

We are swimming in data. Too much to comprehend, at times. Matthias Shapiro walks us through the visualization techniques that can be used to figure out what a data set is trying to tell us.

Bob Metcalfe, founder of 3Com and co-inventor of the ethernet, gives a lecture at Singularity University in July 2009. Metcalfe outlines the Enernet, applying the internet model to one of the most pressing issues facing the globe today, energy.