TECHNOLOGY REPORT

As noted before I think the two most promising “Artificial Intelligence” projects are Blue Brain and DARPA SyNAPSE and I’m happy to see in this Boston blog “Neurdon” by some of the SyNAPSE project folks a few of the DARPA bucks going to elaborate on some of the technical goals of the SyNAPSE project:

SyNAPSE seeks not just to build brain-like chips, but to define a fundamentally distinct form of computational device. These new devices will excel at the kinds of distributed, data-intensive algorithms that complex, real-world environment require…

It’s very exciting stuff this “build a brain” competition.  Although I think the theoretical approach taken by Blue Brain is more consistent with what little we know about how brains work, I’d guess SyNAPSE’s access to DARPA funding will give it the long term edge in terms of delivering a functional thinking machine in the 15-20 year time frame most artificial intelligence researches believe we’ll need for that ambitious goal.

My optimism is greater than many because I think humans have rather dramatically exaggerated the complexity of their own feeble mental abilities by a quite a … bit, and I’d continue to argue that consciousness is much more a function of quantity than quality.

Another promising development in the artificial brain area is in Spain where  Blue Brain project partner universities are working on the project:  Cajal Blue Brain

Via this Forbes article we hear from Joshua Michel-Ross at Oreilly Media that the internet is transforming social activity into what he calls “The Rise of the Social Nervous System”.     It’s a provocative concept that is appearing more and more in the technical and sociological literature.   Although clearly part of the comparison of the collective mental activity to a “hive mind” stems from Science Fiction such as the Borg in Star Trek, it’s also true that human social relationships are of profound importance to the species.   Online social networking has clearly reached a high enough level of use and social interactivity that “virtual socializing” is poised to eclipse “real socializing” in terms of how many hours we spend with each in a day.   Although I’m sure on average we still spend more “real time” than “virtual time” with friends and family, I’d predict this will change within a decade or so, in part as passive TV viewing habits shift  to more interactive online social activities.

As I noted over at my personal blog, Twitter is very important as its simple intervace and explosive growth bring millions of mainstream users into the social media maelstrom.    It’s certainly not clear when all this socializing is going to take humanity, but I’d argue it’s already clear that human relationships are undergoing one of the most significant transformations since the rise of the types of social interactions that came about as cities began to replace rural living, and associating with others of like interests became more important than associating with your neighbors.    On balance these changes are not necessarily good, but I think they are inevitable as people tend to flock most easily to those of like mind who share the same general sensibilities about the world.   Ironically the very technologies that are theoretically connecting us to billions of others may also serve in part to advance our tendency to practice “group think” and only associate with the niches that suit us.   On the optimistic side we may find that the global  social network and ubiquitous interactivity will – for the first time in history – present us with opportunities to collectively solve problems we could not possible solve alone.    As with most technologies it’s up to us how we choose to use the power, so let’s use it wisely.

The Blue Brain project represents the most promising effort to date to reverse engineer a human brain. In phase one of this project, completed last year, the team has modelled a rat neocortical column using an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. Contrary to popular misconceptions there is little reason to believe that a human brain differs all that dramatically from that of many other animals. Many scientists now believe that the most significant difference between human and other animal brains is mainly the larger number of interconnections via a denser brain neocortex region. Surprisingly, the neocortex is a hugely redundant structure where billions of neurons are densely packed into interconnected neocortical columns.

Although it is not the stated goal of the project which is designed primarily to help understand the brain and diagnose brain disorders, the Blue Brain project may be the first to deliver a true “Artificial Intelligence” via this process of reverse engineering.

Thankfully the recent rumor reporting a problem between IBM and the Blue Brain project appears to be false. Technology Report has confirmed with IBM Switzerland that the Blue Brain project is waiting for Phase II funding from the Swiss Government. See the statement from Blue Brain project director Henry Markam below.

A recent intriguing development with Gamma oscillations and the Blue Brain AI simulation is reported here at Neuronism.

Henry Markram, Project Director as quoted by IBM Switzerland to Technology Report on January 19, 2009:

The funding:
There is a serious misconception that IBM somehow funded or donated to
support the Blue Brain Project. The BBP project is funded primarily by the
Swiss government and secondarily by grants and some donations from private
individuals. The EPFL bought the BG, it was not donated to the EPFL. It was
at a reduced cost because at that stage it was still a prototype and IBM
was interested in exploring how different applications will perform on the
machine – we were a kind of beta site.

The Collaboration:
The Blue Brain Project is a project that I conceived over the past 15
years. I chose the name because of the Blue Gene series which is a
fantastic architecture for brain simulations. When we bought the BG, we
also had to make sure that we have the computer engineering and computer
science expertise to run the machine and optimize all the programs. So BG
came to us with IBM’s full support as a technology partner. This component
of the collaboration is invaluable to the Project and will continue and
grow as long as we have a Blue Gene or other architectures from IBM. This
is by far the major component of the collaboration.

IBM Research at T.J. Watson, also contributed a postdoc that was sent to
work with us at the EPFL and assigned a researcher at Watson to work on
some computational neuroscience tasks. The research and term assigned to
these postdocs is done, a success and published. Actually, the term expired
almost a year ago, and the IBM postdoc, Sean Hill, actually transfered and
is now an employee of the BBP and not IBM. The researcher at TJ Watson
worked on a specific problem of collision detection between the axons and
dendrites and this is done very well and already published. Although very
important projects and contributions, this is a small part of the BBP which
is carried out at the EPFL and involves, neuroscience, neuroinformatics,
vizualization, and a vast spectrum of computational neuroscience.

Continuation:
BBP needs BG’s to continue the project. The architecture is perfect for
brain simulations. When we manage to get our funding to buy the next BG/P
finalized, we will start Phase 2 and that will of course involve the basic
(and most significant) technology collaboration, and most likely also many
new collaborations on specific research targeted topics where we see that
IBM can, and would like to, contribute. So this is an intermediate phase
while we get ready for phase 2 – molecular level modeling.

BBP sees IBM as a key partner in the BBP and I do think that IBM also sees
the value in the BBP. We are getting ready for Phase 2, but it has not
started until we get the next BG series.

More about Blue Brain is here

CES is best known as the world’s most prestigious showcase for consumer technologies and keynotes by tech luminaries, but CES also hosts hundreds of conference sessions where panelists discuss everything from the video game economy to developing world technology. Last year I found the session about technology innovations in the developing world both fascinating and inspiring.

Here’s a list of the session categories and the links will take you to CES summaries of each of sessions:

• CES Knowledge Tracks
• Digital Hollywood
• Cable Conference at CES
• CES Game Power Conference
• CES Mobile Entertainment
• CES Reinventing Advertising Conference
• Billboard’s Digital Music Live!
• CES Government 2009
• CONNECTIONS™ SUMMIT
• Consumer Electronics Supply Chain Academy
• Flash Memory—The Future of Consumer Products
• Fourth Generation Mobile Forum^®
• IEEE: International Conference on Consumer Electronics (may require separate registration?)
  
• Kids@Play
• P2P Media Summit LV
• Silvers Summit
• The Social Media Jungle at the 2009 CES
• Storage Visions™ 2009
• Understanding Moisture/Reflow Sensitivity for IC Packages

Convergence08 was a great conference with many interesting people and ideas. Thankfully the number of crackpots was very low, and even the “new age” mysticism stuff was at a minimum. Instead I found hundreds of authors, doctors, biologists, programmers, engineers, physicists, and more clear thinking folks all interested in how the new technologies will shape our world in ways more profound than we have ever experienced before.

My favorite insights came from Monica Anderson’s presentation on her approach to AI programming, which she calls “Artificial Intuition“. Unlike all other approaches to AI I’m familiar with Anderson uses biological evolution as her main analogs for conceptualizing human intelligence. I see this approach as almost a *given* if you have a good understanding of humans and thought, but it’s actually not a popular conceptual framework for AI, where most approaches rely on complex algorithmic logic – logic that Anderson argues clearly did not spawn human intelligence via evolution. Yet Anderson is by no means a programming neophyte – she’s a software engineer who has researched AI for some time, then spent two years programming at Google and then quit to start her own company, convinced that her AI approaches are on the right track.

Anderson’s work is especially impressive to me because as someone with a lot of work in biology under my belt (academically as well as corporeally) it has always surprised me how poorly many computer programmers understand even rudimentary biological concepts such as the underlying simplicity of the human neocortex and the basic principles of evolution which I’d argue emphatically have defined *every single aspect* of our human intelligence over a slow and clumsy, hit and miss process operating over millions of years. I think programmers tend to focus on mathematics and rule systems which are great modelling systems but probably a very poor analog for intelligence. This focus has in many ways poisoned the well of understanding about what humans and other animals do when they … think… which I continue to maintain is “not all that special”.

Anderson’s conceptual framework eliminates what I see as a key impediment to creating strong AI with conventional software engineering – ie having to build a massively complex programmable emulation of human thought. Instead, her approach ties together many simple routines that emulate the simple ways animals have developed to effectively interact with a changing environment.

Combining Anderson’s approach to the programming with the physical models of the neocortical column such as IBM Blue Brain would be my best bet for success in the AI field.

Microsoft is demonstrating a very exciting touch technology – Surface Computers – that are coming soon to a Las Vegas near you. Check out the demo tape at Channel 10. (hmmm – loading problems?). Wait, here’s a shorter one at Popular Mechanics.

Aside from the potential $25,000? cost to spill your coffee and ruin this computerized table this really is an awesome technology, bringing two great user interface features to the “table” literally and figuratively.  The first is touch, which is a nice interface for many forms of navigation and the second is a large screen, which is almost always desirable as a big enhancement of the user experience.

Imagine sitting at your coffee table pulling up email, adjusting the TV, ordering up a pizza for delivery, and researching the influence of the Jacobian Matrix on search engine results.    It doesn’t get much better than that.

Samsung launched the Samsung Q1 tablet PC today. I’ve paid virtually no attention to this market since attending MIX06 last year in Las Vegas and playing around with some of what were then the latest and greatest ultra mobile PC devices. I’m beginning to think Scoble is right – the tablet PC will eventually become a key device for most of us – it just has not got the respect it deserves, perhaps because early models were too far ahead of their time.

My Treo 650 was the best phone last year but I’ve never been happy with the tiny screen that makes browsing problematic at best.   I’d be happy to carry around a somewhat larger gadget if it gave me decent browsing capabilities.    I think the Apple iPhone is on to something with it’s relatively large touchscreen interface.

Press Release on Samsung Q1

ASIMO Demo at Disneyland’s Innovations

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.
This was an impressive but simple demo of an amazing technological achievement. The locomotion was very realistic and impressive as ASIMO walked around and went up and down some stairs.

I fear a lot of young folks get jaded to how cool this stuff is by the wonders of “entertainment” technologies, but I couldn’t help but think that this Robot will *some day* be used to mark the beginning of when human-like robotics really took hold of the collective mindset.

http://world.honda.com/ASIMO/

USA Today reports that China has the world’s second largest online population after the USA. With 94,000,000 online they’ve decided some of the gaming fanatics might need a bit of electrical incentive to stay offline.

Ha – I kind of like this idea, but I don’t think I can get my son to sit still long enough to attach the electrodes.

But seriously folks, these symptoms sound pretty intense:
“… depression, nervousness, fear and unwillingness to interact with others, panic and agitation. They also have sleep disorders, the shakes and numbness in their hands.”