The Co-Evolution of Neuroscience & Computation

Image from Wired Magazine.

[Cross-posted from Signtific Lab.]

Researchers at VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam have applied the analytic methods of graph theory to analyze the neural networks of patients suffering from dementia. Their findings reveal that brain activity networks in dementia sufferers are much more randomized and disconnected than in typical brains. "The underlying idea is that cognitive dysfunction can be illustrated by, and perhaps even explained by, a disturbed functional organization of the whole brain network", said lead researcher Willem de Haan.

Of perhaps deeper significance, this work shows the application of network analysis algorithms to the understanding of neurophysiology and mind, suggesting a similarity in functioning between computational networks and neural networks. Indeed, the research highlights the increasing feedback between computational models and neural models. As we learn more about brain structure & functioning, these understandings translate into better computational models. As computation is increasingly able to model brain systems, we come to understand their physiology more completely. The two modalities are co-evolving.

The interdependence of the two fields has been most recently illustrated with the announcement of the Blue Brain Project which aims to simulate a human brain within 10 years. This ambitious project will inevitably drive advanced research & development in imaging technologies to reveal the structural complexities of the brain which will, in turn, yield roadmaps towards designing better computational structures. This convergence of computer science and neuroscience is laying the foundation for an integrative language of brain computer interface. As the two sciences get closer and closer to each other, they will inevitably interact more directly and powerfully, as each domain adds value to the other and the barriers to integration erode.

This feedback loop between computation and cognition is ultimately bringing the power of programming to our brains and bodies. The ability to create programmatic objects capable of executing tasks on our behalf has radically altered the way we extend our functionality by dematerializing technologies into more efficient, flexible, & powerful virtual domains. This shift  has brought an unprecedented ability to iterate information and construct hyper-technical objects. The sheer adaptive power of these technologies underwrites the imperative towards programming our bodies, enabling us to excercies unprecedented levels of control and augmnetation over our physical form, and further reveal the fabric of mind.

The Revolution is Being Twittered – Tehran is Connected

Image by .faramarz.

“The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through twitter.” So opens the #iranelection cyber war guide for beginners just posted today and widely distributed across the web through Twitter. The guide continues with precise information about what behaviors and syntaxes on Twitter are now being watched by the Iranian security apparatus; which hashtags are legitimate and which are state honey pots used to identify and block IP’s; how to pass new open proxies to those within the Tehranian resistance; and smart guidelines for those considering launching Denial of Service attacks on State websites. The author has compiled a brief & succinct guidebook to help global non-Iranians better help those in Iran who are trying to ensure that these events are not hidden from the eyes of the world.

The guide closes with: “Please remember that this is about the future of the Iranian people, while it might be exciting to get caught up in the flow of participating in a new meme, do not lose sight of what this is really about.” To me, this is about the future of all people.

As Clay Shirky noted, the events in Tehran mark a hugely important historic moment. Under an old theocratic and belligerent rulership, the modernist progressives from Iran’s urban center, Tehran, are using mobile communications and social networks to bypass the State and reach out to the world. Ahmadi’s swiftly-imposed net blackout has failed against the ingenuity of tech-enabled university students and the eagerness of sympathetic geeks across the world to help fight The Man (in this case, the authoritarian and repressive regime of the Ayatollah, the Guardian Council, and President Ahmadi-nejad). This marks a large state change in global power dynamics. In an age moving rapidly towards ubiquitous networked mobile computing, transparency and representation are the emerging foundations of civilization, simultaneously empowering the principles of Democracy while de-legitimizing the very notion of the State.

Perhaps even more surprising is the critical role of Twitter as the de facto global, real-time, open communication and collaboration channel. Using SMS, every mobile phone user on the planet has the ability to message Twitter and reach out to a global network. Twitter’s architecture guarantees an exponential distribution of information, and their lack of public shareholders allows them to take a more humanitarian posture. Protesters in Tehran were getting messages to hi-value nodes like Stephen Fry, John Perry Barlow, and William Gibson who then retweet the message to hundreds of thousands of their followers. By Monday #iranelection was the #1 trending term across Twitter and has stayed there since. Twitter is the primary channel for information coming in and out of Tehran regarding the contested election of it’s president – in a critical middle eastern Islamic nation, oil-rich with an aggressive posture towards the US and it’s allies, and who is poised on the brink of becoming a fully nuclear state. The out-of-left-field social networking phenomena has been so valuable to the goals of US interests in Iran that the U.S. State Department requested that Twitter postpone it’s scheduled service downtime.

The regime is now evicting reporters from Iran. The challenger, Moussavi, is likely not much different from Ahmadi-nejad. Both are pre-approved by the Ayatollah and Guardian Council. The pro-Moussavi population wants to see voting irregularities investigated and their “moderate” candidate approved as president. Tehran’s tech-savvy are redefining the fundamental relationship between people and governments. All power structures should be watching the events in Tehran and across the web. The people are getting smarter and bolder.

This is the age of empowered collectives striding across a globalized, hyper-connected world. In a virtualized information space, borders are less meaningful and countries are loose contextual buckets through which people interact. The swift assistance provided by western techies is not really about the US helping Iran, it’s about good, aspirational people trying to help other good, aspirational people. The playing field is leveling as humanity learns more and more about itself, overcoming fear and stereotypes and ignorance simply by communicating more effectively.

There will be a reaction as states work to retain power, upping their game to adapt to the new tech. And there will be darker consequences of these new tool as the All-Seeing Digital Eye rises over the land. We struggle now to free information but the next big struggle may be to secure it. All coins have two sides and all technologies will be bent to human will. Hopefully we’re all getting a little bit better at cooperating with each new day.

***This was written in a bit of a rush before I jet. Here are a couple more links:
Here’s a list of good info links.
Lyn Jeffery of IFTF writes Field Notes from the Iran Twitter Stream.
SF Gate article: SF Techie Stir Iranian Protests.
Jamais Cascio: The Dark Side of Twittering a Revolution.
And Hillary Clinton Defends Twitter Efforts for Iran.

Another Rant: On the Cloud, Augmented Reality, & the Networked World

[This is a reply I left recently to a Global Futures question about the near-future of the web. It goes a little off-topic at the end but such is the risk of systems analysis. Everything's connected.]

Within 10-15 years mobile devices will constantly interact with the world around us, analyzing objects, faces, signage, locations, and anything else their sensors can engage. Camera viewfinders will identify visual sources using algorithms to match them up with cloud data repositories. Bluetooth and GPS will interact on sub-channels silently exchanging relationships with embedded sensors across devices and objects. A user’s mobile device will become their IP address hosting much of their profile information and mediating relationships across social nets, commercial transactions, security clearances, and the array of increasingly smart objects and devices.

Cloud access and screen presence will be nearly ubiquitous further blurring the line between desktop, laptop, server, mobile devices, and the objects in our world. It will all be screens interfacing between data, objects, and humans. Amidst the overwhelming data/content glut we will outsource mathematical chores to cloud agents dedicated to scraping data and filtering the bits that are pertinent to our personalized affinities and needs. These data streams will be highly dynamic and cloud agents will send them to rich media layers that will render the results in comprehensible and meaningful displays.

The human sensorium and its interaction with reality will be highly augmented through mobile devices that layer rich information over the world around us. The digital world will move heavily into the natural analog world as the boundaries between the two further erode. This will be readily apparent in the increasing amount of communication we will receive from appliances, vehicles, storefronts, other people, animals, and even plants all wired to the cloud. Meanwhile, cloud agents will sort through vast amounts of human behavioral information creating smart profiles and socioeconomic and environmental systems models with incredible complexity and increasing predictive ability. The cloud itself will be made more intelligible to agents by the standardization of semantic web protocols implemented into most new sites and services. Agents will concatenate to tie services together into meta-functions, just as human collectives will be much more common as we move into increasingly multicellular functional bodies.

The sense of self and our philosophical paradigms will be iterating and revising on an almost weekly basis as we spread out across the cloud and innumerable virtual spaces connected through instantaneous communication. Virtual worlds themselves will be increasingly common but will break out of the walled-garden models of the present, allowing comm channels and video streams to move freely between them and the social web. World of Warcraft will have live video feeds from in-world out to device displays. Mobile GPS will report a user’s real-world location as well as their virtual location, mashing both into Google Maps and the SketchUp-enabled virtual map of the planet.

All of this abstraction will press back on the world and create even greater value for real face-to-face interactions. Familial bonds will be more and more cherished and local communities will take greater and greater control of their lives away from unreliable global supply chains and profit-driven corporate bodies. Most families will engage in some form of gardening to supplement their food supply. The state itself will be hollowed out through over-extended conflicts and insurgencies coupled with ongoing failures to manage domestic civic instabilities. Power outages and water failures will be common in large cities. This will of course further invigorate alternative energy technologies and shift civic responsibilities to local communities. US manufacturing will have partially shifted towards alternative energy capture and storage but much of the real successes will be in small progressive towns rallying around local resources, small-scale fab, and pre-existing economic successes.

All in all, the future will be a rich collage. Totally new and much the same as it has been.

twitchboard.net: the rise of personal cloud agents

The folks over at Twitchboard.net have the right idea. From their site:

TwitchBoard listens to your twitter account, and forwards messages on to other internet services based on what it hears. Our first service will automatically save any links you tweet to the del.icio.us bookmarking service. We’re working on connections to many other services — stay tuned!

This simple tool is a software agent built on the web platform. It lives on a server as a script watching your personal datastream – Twitter, in this case. The initial service notices when you have put an url in your tweet, grabs it, and passes it along to your del.icio.us account as a bookmark. It effectively concatenates two web services together to optimize your workflow and eliminate the need to double post. It extends the function of Twitter to include the function of Del.icio.us recapitulating the phylogenetic imperative evolving from unicellular function to multicellular. Twitterl.icio.us!

Twitchboard represents the emerging class of cloud agents that will help us sort and search the massive volumes of data we interact with regularly. Our connections are getting too dense and the data we’re working with is growing far too big for us humans to handle manually. We need subroutines customized to our interests, affiliations, businesses, and collaborations that can do the heavy data lifting for us while we focus on the meaningful expressions these agents will create for us from the noise.

Increasingly we’ll have swarms of such agents running across our digital lives doing our bidding and the bidding of numerous marketing and security agencies as well. These tools will have particular value across the enterprise where they will monitor workflows & financial movements, gather market data from clouds, and sift through productivity metrics to formulate valuable business intel. Agents will tell us about our lives and our health delivering colorful abstracts with pretty animated datasets showing how much we drove this week, how many miles we walked, tasks completed vs. outstanding, and much more feedback based on an array of scripts & sensors.

Twitchboard is using the fertile comm grounds of Twitter and it’s API to watch the datastream for keywords that can drive additional services. You can bet they’re also deriving all sorts of interesting meta-patterns from the Twitter feed that will be plugged into further modular mashups and visualizations. Through it’s popularity and the openness of it’s API Twitter is lighting a roadmap towards the semantic web. Groups like Twitchboard are building the services reading the machine web and helping us better manage the mountains of data piling up, meanwhile giving rise to a class of autonomous agents moving across devices, sensors, cameras, and clouds.

[Kudos to Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb for mentioning me & this post in her column!]

Cat Cam Finally Within Reach

Via Gadget Lab:

The budget needed for an at-home surveillance system has just been slashed to a couple of Jeffersons. The eyeCam Micro Wireless camera, a plug-and-play with a wireless transmission range of 450 ft., is now down to $40, making it one of the most affordable spy video gadgets out there.

Click-through for sample video – spy cam attached to Dragonfly remote heli, ie personal neighborhood surveillance drone. Federal laws may apply.

Do You Like Our Owl?

The Tyrell Corporation:

Based in Los Angeles in the year 2019, Tyrell is named after its founder Dr. Eldon Tyrell and is a high-tech biocorp primarily concerned with the production of life-like androids called replicants. Tyrell’s slogan is “More human than human”. The headquarters for the corporation is over 700-stories tall. The Tyrell corporation is the only outfit making Nexus-6 replicants which are so human-like that the only way L.A.P.D Blade Runner Units can indentify them is to sit suspects down and go through an exhausting empathy test called the “Voight-Kampff Scale.”

The Tyrell Corporation was also involved in the exporting of replicant labor to the outer space colonies for situations deemed too dangerous and degrading for regular humans such as military operations, high risk industrial work, prostitution and slave labor. One could call it interstellar commerce or just growing an army of slaves.

Monkeys Taught to Control Robots. Humanity On the Run.

In a staggering breech of public interest, U of Pitt researchers have taught a couple of rhesus macaque monkeys to control a robotic prosthesis with their mind. No word on when the lab fires will be extinguished and the rampaging robo-monkeys will be defeated.

Two monkeys have managed to use brain power to control a robotic arm to feed themselves. The feat marks the first time a brain-controlled prosthetic limb has been wielded to perform a practical task.

Previous demonstrations in monkeys and humans have tapped into the brain to control computer cursors and virtual worlds, and even to clench a robot hand. But complicated physical activities like eating are “a completely different ball game”, says Andrew Schwarz, a neurological engineer at the University of Pittsburgh…

Yeah, right. Those robo-monkeys will be running the Pentagon within days.

Militarized Robotic Biomimics Coming Soon

In a disturbing-but-not-surprising move, the U.S. military is contracting the development of small robotic biomimics for field deployment. Equipped with sensors and networked relays these robocritters will likely end up scurrying through apartment complexes at home and abroad, ala Minority Report. Expect swarming behaviors, social intelligence, and networked biometrics.

Everybody freeze for the spiders…

British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives [ed note: the video shows bugs being used to target a building for rocket attack].

Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby.

Soldiers will carry the robots into combat and use a small tracked vehicle to transport them closer to their targets.

Then they would swarm into the building and relay images back to the soldiers’ hand-held or wrist-mounted computers, warning them of any threats inside.

BAE Systems has just signed a £19million contract to develop the robots for the US Army.

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Parting Notes on ETech

This was a great conference and the most consistent collection of speakers and topics I’ve ever experienced. Very fun and inspiring. Lots of hip 30-somethings trying to dream up tomorrow and make it real. It was a a very balanced, yet cutting-edge talk aimed at an eager (and surprisingly mixed-gender)crowd. I noticed that most folks were using Mac laptops – this part of the edge seems to prefer Apple – and it was fascinating to watch many who were blogging the talks while pulling up references dropped by the speakers, tweeting out to Twitter, and snapping/downloading/posting photos in real-time. As speakers dropped references I was pulling them up on my laptop and dropping links into my blog notes.

In the lobby a team was showing off a data viz video mapping real-time communications connecting NYC to the rest of the world. Andrea noticed that a surprising number were with an Italian city called Perugia. Maybe next year they could map the live feed of all web traffic from ETech. Imagine the bitstreams rising off such a gathering of digiterati.

Maybe it was just the Sudafed coursing through our virus-ridden veins (thank you Portland) but ETech was a total intellectual turn-on, from ambient objects, Asian mobile media, green policy and sustainability, hardware hacking & drone building, Austrian post-Situationists, neuroengineering, and the digital salvation of Democracy itself.

I hope I can go back next year!

Open Source Hardware (Limor Fried & Philip Torrone) – ETech08

Hardware is much easier to copy now. Hardware & software is blurring – ex: firmware updates.
Speed of hardware hacking is remarkable.

Why open source hardware? Contribute to the pool of knowledge; freedom to pursue software/hardware creativity; community development and quality; excitement about building things; education;

Layers:
- Hardware/mechanical diagrams: 2D models, vector, DXF or AI (KiCAD)
- Scematics & circuit diagrams: PDF, BMP, GIF, PNG
- Parts list (Bill of Materials): data sheets (x0xb0x TB303)
- Layout diagrams: physical map of parts
- Core/Firmware: on-board source code
- Software/API
Like most developers, they don’t mention the human interface layer.

Roomba has an open API. Companies that release open platforms find much greater value (and mindshare) from user mods.
Ambient Orb publishes schematics and parts list. Neuros OSD publishes schematics (semi-open but falls short).
Hardware is mostly based on patents, not copyright. Licensing: CC, GPL, BSD, MIT
Chumby: programmable data portal.

Other open source hardware resources (business models): Fab@Home, Daisy MP3 player, Adafruit, Arduino open-source electronics prototyping platform. See also Make magazine & the Maker Fair.

Cool stuff: Twittering plants with Arduino – plants that call you and say they need to be watered (Twitter as SMS bridge); Open prosthetics; Minty Boost open source USB charger;

Ed note: Imagine an online repository of mechanical diagrams for DIY desktop fab/rep…

DIY Drones (Chris Anderson) – ETech08

Fun with robots! Making aerial drones. Eye in the Sky. DIYdrones.com

UAV’s are very expensive. How to democratize the tech?
How cheap and simple can a UAV be?

Two requirements: stabilization & navigation.

$80 copilot: where is “down”? Use IR to seek horizon – consistent gradient between land & sky. Yields absolute frame of reference.
Could LEGO solve the probelm? Yes (under $1000), mindstorms controller in light model plane. Basic prototype, requires manual takeoff & landing.
Onboard camera takes pics with geotagging. Genereates low-cost aerial photos with very high res using low altitude with a 5Mpix camera.

OK, but can you use a cellphone? GPS, camera, broadband, onboard processing & mem.
Yes! Airplane now has a phone # – send it GPS waypoints (not yet realized in prototype).
In theory, small UAV’s can hop across cell networks for nav & comm.
IR horizon sensor can also be used to stabilize the camera so it always looks down.
Be careful, especially when flying over secured federal facilities!

Can we make it cheaper (under$500)? Yes, using homemade embedded processers. Any open source or cheap chip can support an autopilot routine.
Program & test with flight sim apps. Watch your robotic UAV run the flight sim!

How to make an aerial robotic contest for kids? Use small blimps.
Blimps are intrinsically autonomous; when they fail, they fail very gracefully; nice to have around.
Prototype maintains altitude by pinging off the ground (IR); vertical prop holds elevations; IR beacon acts as waypoint; blimp will seek the waypoint; relative frame of reference it can use compass and IR to make it’s way across waypoints;

Live demo: blimp is following the presenter around the room. ~$100. Entirely autonomous, if not very smart.
Evolution Robotics is a company that produces a bot nav solution. Paired with autopilot, the UAV can use more advanced navigation and movement. Aerial robotics is the cutting edge of robotics: “Soon the sky will be darkened with aerial drones!”

Regulations govern UAV deploy. Amateurs must fly under 400ft, maintain line-of-sight, and pilot can assume full control.
Very limiting. Power source is also a limit.

Ed Notes: could use RFID or other beacons to deploy UAV over your home or for tracking your location; pair with live hi-res camera feed.

Heading to San Diego for ETech2008

Hacking brains & iPhones, building DIY aerial drones, ambient data streaming, data viz and crowd movements, ARGs, Vegas, and the Self awakened to it’s own tech. Oh baby!

With the help of my special lady friend (who got work to sport for the hotel, pass, and air) and the help of my employer (I’m doing some booth shifts on the floor in exchange for a pass – I get to rep Adobe AIR), I’m leaving tomorrow morning for sunny San Diego and a week at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference! I’m psyched. I’ve wanted to go for the last few years but couldn’t afford it. All this time, I should have just told my corporate overlords they needed to send me on the company ticket!

I’ll be sending photos to the urbeingrecorded portal via tumblr, and I’ll likely post some keen bits here. Otherwise I’ll be fast hacking my iPhone to control a robotic crowd-sourcing drone I will use to track the culinary habits of tech luminaries and international political dissidents whose footpaths I’ll be datastreaming to various dynamic art installations and ambient devices.

From their site:

How does technology help you perceive things that you never noticed before? How does it help you be found, or draw attention to issues, objects, ideas, and projects that are important, no matter their size or location?

At the 2008 version of ETech, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, we’ll take a wide-eyed look at the brand new tech that’s tweaking how we are seen as individuals, how we choose to channel and divert our energy and attention, and what influences our perspective on the world around us:

Body Hacking. Genomics Hacking. Brain Hacking. Sex Hacking. Food Hacking. iPhone Hacking.
DIY Aerial Drones. DIY Talking Things. DIY Spectrum. DIY Apocalypse Survival.
Emerging Tech of India, Cuba, and Africa. International Political Dissidents.
Visualize Data and Crowds. Ambient Data Streaming.
Good Policy. Energy Policy. Defense Policy. Genetic Policy. Corruption.
Alternate Reality Games. Emotions of Games. Sensor Games.

ETech 2008 will cover all of these topics and more. We put on stage the speakers and the ideas that help our attendees prepare for and create the future, whatever it might be. Great speakers are going to pull us forward with them to see what technology can do… and sometimes shouldn’t do. From robotics and gaming to defense and geolocation, we’ll explore promising technologies that are just that–still promises–and renew our sense of wonder at the way technology is influencing and altering our everyday lives.

w00t!

DARPA on the Path to Develop Insect Cyborgs

From LiveScience:

Cornell University researchers have succeeded in implanting electronic circuit probes into tobacco hornworms… The hornworms… mature into long-lived moths whose muscles can be controlled with the implanted electronics.

…The ultimate goal of the HI-MEMS program is to provide insect cyborgs that can demonstrate controlled flight; the insects would be used in a variety of military and homeland security applications.

I can’t imagine that anyone would be able to, you know, hack into DARPA’s cyborg bug army and use them for their own means…

androids dreaming of electric dino’s

I saw this post on Boing Boing today wherein Mark Fraunfelder talks about his unexpected emotional empathy for the Pleo robotic dinosaur that his two daughters have fallen in love with. What strikes me is how we humans naturally want to imbue life and feeling into the things around us. Mark and his family know the Pleo is a robot and yet it’s behavior is real enough that they instinctively come to regard it as having feelings. It makes me suspect that the animistic quality of a thing is a very real property that is not simply a quality of the thing itself, but is an emergent state between the thing and it’s witness. In other words, the Pleo becomes real by it’s interactions with sensitive humans.

We want those quality interactions with our world so we give life to the things around us. Hence, the Turing Test which postulates that any AI that can be mistaken for a real human in a natural-language conversation is, effectively, as intelligent as a human. So the validity of a thing’s intelligence or sensitivity to it’s world is based in part on the human observing and interacting with it. Furthermore, I would suggest that it’s irrelevant to discuss whether or not animism is real. It’s as real as the real effects it has on the behavior of those who witness it as such.

I’m impressed with the robot’s behavior. It snuggles when you hold it. It falls asleep when you cradle it. It gets frisky when you scratch it under the chin. It’s much more lifelike than Sony’s discontinued Aibo.

So when I watched this video of a couple of guys from Dvice torturing the Pleo and making it whimper pathetically, I felt uncomfortable, even though I knew it was absolutely ridiculous to feel that way.

My wife didn’t want to watch the video. She said that even though the Pleo was incapable of feeling anything, watching the video is “bad for your psyche,” and that the people who hit the Pleo were damaging their pscyhes, too.

science fiction, science future

From Mainichi News

The Advanced Personal Armament System — Japan’s version of the Future Soldier project, designed to modernize combat infantry units — offers a network-linked helmet providing night and thermal vision, amongst other capabilities. It was introduced at a presentation held by the ministry’s Technical Research and Development Institute titled, “Towards the realization of Gundam.”