Engineered life
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Are New Yorkers — and city folk in general — really so busy and self-absorbed that we have no concern for others? Do we lack a moral compass? Is Rick Santorum right? For more than 50 years, “urban psychologists” have been faking seizures, dropping cash and breaking into cars in broad daylight to see if strangers would intervene. They’ve discovered two things.
Your next mayor: A computer - Salon.com
Researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a simple mathematical model of the brain which provides a remarkably complete statistical account of the complex web of connections between various brain regions. Their findings have been published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) . The brain shares a similar pattern of connections with other complex networks such as social networks and the world wide web. However, until now, it was not known what rules were involved in the formation of the human brain network.
Wiring the brain - Research - University of Cambridge
BBC Knowledge - The big idea – consciousness
It’s something that governs our perception of reality and tells us we exist. We all know that we have it, yet scientists are still struggling to pin down exactly what it is... The room is full of people, yet totally silent. Sitting on cushions, their eyes are closed and their faces expressionless. They look totally absorbed in something – as well they might, for they are attempting to get to grips with one of the most profound mysteries in all science: the nature of consciousness. As practitioners of Buddhist meditation, they’re using mind-watching techniques that were developed over 2500 years ago by the Indian philosopher Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha.
Now, computer scientist Hava Siegelmann of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an expert in neural networks, has taken Turing's work to its next logical step. She is translating her 1993 discovery of what she has dubbed "Super-Turing" computation into an adaptable computational system that learns and evolves, using input from the environment in a way much more like our brains do than classic Turing-type computers. She and her post-doctoral research colleague Jeremie Cabessa report on the advance in the current issue of Neural Computation .
Computer scientists form mathematical formulation of the brain's neural networks
» Brian: a simple and flexible simulator for spiking neural networks
Neurons communicate with stereotypical electrical impulses called action potentials or spikes. This fact has been known for about 150 years, but most neural network theories in the 20 th century have described neural activity in terms of firing rates. Spikes have been seen as simply the biological elements that the brain used in order to communicate and compute with these analog rates, in the same way as the intensity of light is encoded by the arrival rate of photons. However, over the last 15 years, neurons have been found to be more deterministic than previously thought and the coordination of spikes now seems to play a major role in sensory coding and computation. Consequently, many neuroscientists are now interested in modeling neural computation at the spike level. Unfortunately, simulating spiking models is much more difficult and time consuming than standard analog models, which has caused many scientists to refrain from making this switch.
Dr. Peter Norvig is Director of Research at Google Inc. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field. Previously he was head of Computational Sciences at NASA and a faculty member at USC and Berkeley. In this talk he discusses, among other things, how non-parametric models can be applied to vision and language problems in data-rich environments.
Models and Theories
The Future of Moral Machines - NYTimes.com
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. A robot walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a screwdriver.” A bad joke, indeed. But even less funny if the robot says “Give me what’s in your cash register.”
AI competitions
NEW Read, Share & Download Vision plays a fundamental role for living beings by allowing them to interact with the environment in an effective and efficient way. The ultimate goal of Machine Vision is to endow artificial systems with adequate capabilities to cope with not a pr ...
Free Artificial Intelligence Open Access Books | InTechOpen
Journals: PLoS ONE Brain-Computer Interface Based on Generation of Visual Images Pavel Bobrov, Alexander Frolov, Charles Cantor, Irina Fedulova, Mikhail Bakhnyan, Alexander Zhavoronkov . Introduction A brain -computer interface (BCI) establishes ... Brain -Computer Interface Based on Generation of Visual Images ... movement signal by a noninvasive brain -computer interface PLoS ONE : Research Article, published 10 Jun 2011 10.1371/journal.pone.0020674 Loading Meta Information...
PLoS ONE : accelerating the publication of peer-reviewed science
Consciousness Studies/The Philosophical Problem/Machine Consciousness - Wikibooks, open books for an open world
[ edit ] Elementary Information and Information Systems Theory When one physical thing interacts with another a change in "state" occurs. For instance, when a beam of white light, composed of a full spectrum of colours is reflected from a blue surface all colours except blue are absorbed and the light changes from white to blue.Interesting thing at UAI 2011 « Machine Learning (Theory)
I had a chance to attend UAI this year, where several papers interested me, including: Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos Sum-Product Networks: A New Deep Architecture . We’ve already discussed this one , but in a nutshell, they identify a large class of efficiently normalizable distributions and do learning with it. Yao-Liang Yu and Dale Schuurmans , Rank/norm regularization with closed-form solutions: Application to subspace clustering .Comparison of agent-based modeling software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the last few years, the agent-based modeling (ABM) community has developed several practical agent based modeling toolkits that enable individuals to develop agent-based applications. More and more such toolkits are coming into existence, and each toolkit has a variety of characteristics. Several individuals have made attempts to compare toolkits to each other (see references).Automated reasoning
Neurology
Natural language
Artificial Intelligence
machine learning
Artificial neural networks
Artifactual Intelligence--made things with minds
Emotion