Making a Better Eye

The Eye | h Magazine: "Engineers at the University of Washington have developed a contact lens that creates a virtual display superimposed over the normal field of vision. By using a transparent part of the eye to place instrumentation, the contact will be safe for human wear. The lenses will be imprinted with an assortment of electronic circuits and lights to make superimposition possible. A future version of the product might include the addition of wireless communication via the lens. The team has already demonstrated that rabbits can wear the lens for 20 minutes safely without any adverse effects, and are looking into a feasible production method for the contacts. There are still some major wrinkles to be ironed out in the manufacturing process, given that the materials need to be both safe for the body and incredibly small."

GR: This technology works by modifying input to one's existing eye(s). Others are working on *replacing* the human eye -- patching an electronic device directly into the visual cortex. Sound far out? Consider the Cochlear Implant.

Brain On a Chip

Brain On a Chip | h Magazine: "Today's most powerful supercomputers are all massively parallel processing systems with names like Earth Simulator, Blue Gene, ASCI White, ASCI Red, ASCI Purple, and ASCI Thor's Hammer. Through Moore's Law – which states that the number of transistors on a chip double every eighteen months – single chips that function as parallel processor arrays are becoming cost effective. Examples include chips from Ambric, picoChip, and Tilera.

The brain is also massively parallel, but currently on a different scale than the most powerful supercomputers. The human cortex has about 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses. A supercomputer capable of running a software simulation of the human brain doesn’t yet exist. Researchers estimate that it would require at least a machine with a computational capacity of 36.8 petaflops (a petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) and a memory capacity of 3.2 petabytes – a scale that supercomputer technology isn't expected to hit for at least three years."

Wolfram|Alpha: Searching for Truth

Wolfram|Alpha: Searching for Truth | h Magazine: "Kicking off our conversation, Stephen remarks that, “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t really a search engine, because we compute the answers, and we discover new truths.� If anything, you might call it a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have been written down before.”

Despite his disclaimer, Wolfram|Alpha looks like a search engine, in that there’s a one-line box where you type in a question.� The output appears a second or two later, as a page of text and graphics below the box.� What's happening behind the scenes? Rather than looking up the answer to your question, Wolfram|Alpha figures out what your question means, looks up the necessary data to answer your question, computes an answer, designs a page to present the answer in a pleasing way, and sends the page back to your computer."

The Future of Machine Intelligence

AGI versus AI: "Just to drive home the “AGI versus narrow AI” distinction, it’s worth contrasting Franklin’s characterization of AGI with the definition of Artificial Intelligence given on the website of the AAAI: “advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines.“ This is indeed a noble goal – but it’s also a very broad goal, covering all sorts of narrowly specialized software programs or hardware devices implementing particular mechanisms of mind but not attempting any sort of human-level generalization, reflection, innovation or insight. The mission of AGI researchers, and of the AGI conference series, is to focus more directly on the original, more ambitious goal of the AI field."

What's next in robotics?

Knowledge@Wharton Smart Robots: What's Next?: "The answer is more than merely academic. In the United States, the Pentagon is spending billions -- as much as $100 billion over a number of years, according to some technology analysts -- to develop robots that can aid or replace human soldiers. The U.S. Department of Defense's Future Combat Systems (FCS) modernization initiative is funding research to develop that technology. Among its recipients are Lee and others on a Penn team that was awarded $22 million by the Army Research Lab to create robots that can operate in combat zones with little supervision."