New Brain Machine Reads Mind

A new advance in brain-machine interfaces could enable scientists to one day decode what a person is thinking simply by monitoring brain cell activity.

The finding, detailed in the Oct. 27 issue of the journal Nature, could also help researchers understand how the brain performs its myriad visual tricks, such as recognizing someone in a crowd.

In the research, scientists connect the activity of single neurons to images on a computer screen and demonstrate how a person can fade these images in and out by simply thinking about the pictures. To find these image-specific neurons, the researchers scanned the brains of 12 participants as they looked at hundreds of images.


“Now we actually are able to read people’s mind, on a very small subset of things, but you can still read their minds,” study co-author Moran Cerf, a computational neuroscientist at UCLA, told TechNewsDaily.

So far, the researchers have found four image-specific neurons for each participant. The next step would be to map thousands of these neurons with their related image or concept. For example, the neurons related to thirst and hunger could be decoded to let patients who can’t communicate convey their needs to a caretaker.

The science of mind reading has made some impressive gains in the last few years. Researchers recently discovered how to tell what memory a person was recalling by looking at brain scans, and have speculated that a “ mind-reading hat ” device could be used to foresee and prevent mental hiccups.

The researchers talked to the patients to determine their interests — favorite music, traveling experiences and so on. They then created a set of hundreds of images related to these topics, which they showed the participant while keeping an eye on their brain activity.

One participant, for example, showed a single-neuron spike for actor Josh Brolin, one for Marilyn Monroe, another for tennis player Venus Williams, and a fourth for Michael Jackson. When that participant thought about Venus Williams, only the Venus Williams neuron would fire.

One outcome of this is that, “if the patient learns to control neurons perfectly, instead of having the image appear on the screen you can connect his brain to a cursor,” Cerf said. Marilyn Monroe could make the cursor move up, while thinking of Josh Brolin could move the cursor to the right, for example.

A brain-machine interface is just one possible application of this research, Cerf said. Another would be to resolve a debate about how our brains choose one image over another

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First-All Robotic Prostate Surgery

Robotics is advancing every day, and over the years people invented some amazing robots, but today we have the first robot to have performed surgery on actual human body. These robots are not as usual, they don’t play instruments and carry heavy things anymore, but they perform real surgeries at Canada’s McGill University Health Centre. So far, there are only two robots that can perform surgeries, DaVinci, a surgical robot, and anaesthetic robot McSleepy. 

You may have heard of the Da Vinci robot before. But for those of you that haven't, basically it's a robot that allows a doctor to control an ultra-small set of robotic pincers and make micro movements on a scale human hands are incapable of.

Dr A Aprikian said that The DaVinci allows surgeons to work from a workstation operating surgical instruments with delicate movements of our fingers with a precision that cannot be provided by humans alone.

He and his team of surgeons operated four robotic arms that can rotate 360 degrees from a dedicated workstation via video control with 3D high definition image quality.

In this operation, they have removed part of the patient's prostate gland, which sits at the neck of the urethra and produces the fluid part of semen.

It is a software system that directs infusion pumps in a patient's vein to release specifically timed and measured doses of drugs that induce sleepiness, control pain and relax muscles during an operation. The computerized system also provides continuous feedback on how the patient is responding to the drugs as surgery progresses, from brainwave patterns and muscle contractions to heart rate and blood pressure readings.

Dr Aprikian said that McSleepy helped to create the perfect conditions needed for robotic surgery.

He said: 'Automated anesthesia delivery via McSleepy guarantees the same high quality of care every time it is used, independent from the subjective level of expertise.'

His colleague Dr Thomas Hemmerling said they were still improving the robotic approach. Just last month, researcher Linda van den Bedem from the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven unveiled a robot that used 'force feedback' to allow the surgeon to feel what he or she wa doing.

But Dr Hemmerling said:'Robots in medicine can provide health care of higher safety and precision, thus ultimately improving outcomes.'

For more information about how the robot do the surgery you can access to below video

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Human Robot Learns to Sing

Nowadays we all have known that Japan is the land of robots and this latest creation shows that Japan is trying to put its robots on a whole new level. Today we have new robot that comes from Japan, that can look and sing like a real human being. We already saw robots from Japan that can mimic our looks, but now robots can sing as well as humans.

The robot is called the HRP-4 diva bot and it will match the sound of an actual singer as well as singer’s facial expressions. In order to achieve this, HRP-4 diva bot is utilized by VocaListener program to watch human mouth and to memorize particular notes.

This robot primarily uses two technologies. One is for its singing voice. Last year, we used Yamaha's Vocaloid software to synthesize notes directly. But this year, we've used our own technology, called VocalListener. This is a new technology, which synthesizes a singing voice on the computer side, as if imitating a person's singing voice. Also, for the robot's facial expressions, we've developed another new technology, called Vocawatcher. This analyzes a video of a person singing, to create expressions naturally."

To make the robot's facial movements even more natural, AIST is also developing a new capability: synthesizing realistic breathing sounds by detecting a human singer's breath.

"Here, breath is detected from sound alone, by acoustic signal processing. When a person sings, their breathing makes a "ha" sound. The robot learns the breath sounds of many people in advance, using technology called a hidden Markov model. In this way, the robot detects where the sounds will emerge, and reproduces them synthetically, using the breath sounds in Vocaloid."

"For robots to become widespread in society, I think they need to be used widely in the entertainment industry. As one way of enabling this, we've tackled the challenge of seeing how well a robot can imitate a human singer. And that depends on voice and expression. Through research like this, we hope the entertainment industry will be able to make widespread use of robots."


Here is the video about HRP-4

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Autonomous Car in Action

Nowadays, with the development of technology its no wonder that we see a lot of smart cars all over the world, but this time we have something special. We might not need to hire a driver if we're too lazy to take ourselves around town in the future. This smart taxi developed in Germany and it drives itself without a driver. Here is Germany's Freie University that has just demostrated self-driving driverless taxi to rival with Google's self-driving cars that have travelled some of trickiest road in California last which developed last week. When the Google's robot cars has the backup human driver, the autonomous car developed in Germany has its own.

This taxi drives itself is equipped with laser, radar and sensor-equipped VW Passat, dubbed "Made in Germany," has a companion  an iPad app from Appirion are used for navigation of this driverless VW Passat. All that you have to do in order to use this smart cars is to start an app on you iPad, enter your coordinates  and taxi will find you according to your GPS coordinates and pick you up such like you are a rich kid. After that, you just have to enter your desired location and you’re ready to go. 

Instead of waiting aimlessly outside in the rain, like so many of us have had to do after we’ve called a taxi, iPad owners can sit inside and track the taxi’s location in real time. Self-driving taxi from Germany’s Freie University just like the perfect future car, but it will take some time until standard taxis are replaced by the smart ones.

Check out the video to get clear how does the autonomous car actually work:

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First Post

Hi bloggers,

Thanks for visiting my blog and thanks for the lecturer for giving me chance to create and improve in blogging. This is the first time I create and learn about blog. The purpose I create this blog of course for our "Internet Technology" individual assignment and share latest information. I will discuss about latest and updated technology in the world. I will keep on updating the blog. So stay updated. Hope you will get interested in the topic I am discussing. Further requests and comments please email me at aho_joker8@hotmail.com

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