IBM and five leading universities have been awarded $4.9 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal is to create computing systems that will emulate the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition while rivaling its low power consumption and compact size.
The amount of digital data is growing at a mind-boggling 60 percent each year. But without the ability to monitor, analyze and react to this information in real-time, the majority of its value may be lost. Cognitive computing offers the promise of systems that can integrate and analyze vast amounts of data from many sources in the blink of an eye, allowing businesses or individuals to make rapid decisions in time to have a significant impact. A cognitive computer, emulating a brain, could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of relevant information and help people make good decisions rapidly.
By seeking inspiration from the structure, dynamics, function, and behavior of the brain, the researchers aim to break the conventional programmable machine paradigm. Ultimately, they hope to rival the brain's low power consumption and small size by using nanoscale devices for synapses and neurons. This technology stands to bring about entirely new computing architectures and programming paradigms. The end goal: ubiquitously deployed computers imbued with a new intelligence that can integrate information from a variety of sensors and sources, deal with ambiguity, respond in a context-dependent way, learn over time and carry out pattern recognition to solve difficult problems based on perception, action and cognition in complex, real-world environments.
This research project is the first phase of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative. Initial research will focus on demonstrating nanoscale, low power synapse-like devices and on uncovering the functional microcircuits of the brain. The long-term mission is to demonstrate low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence.

At SID 2008 in Los Angeles, Seiko Epson showed off a new electronic paper. The 13.4-inch (A4-size) electronic paper was developed by combining electrophoretic electronic ink of E Ink Corp and a low-temperature polycrystal Si-TFT of Seiko Epson. It has a pixel count of 3104 × 4128 and definition is as high as 385ppi. Contrast ratio is 10:1 and reflectance is 40%. With this prototype the company believes it entered the final stage of replacing traditional paper with electronic paper.

Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have demonstrated that they can simulate the intelligence of a four year old child. The Second Life environment and a 100 teraflop supercomputer were used to perform the demonstration. They named the child Eddie and he behaves like a typical young boy. The child is a product of logic-based artificial intelligence and complex modelling techniques. Eddie has his own set of beliefs, and the ability to reason about his beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age.



"Our technologies can be applied to any digital environment, and indeed we are specifically aiming, with IBM, at environments in which the physical and the virtual directly interact." said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer's Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project. Eventually, more advanced versions of the artificial intelligence technology will be put to use in entertainment and gaming, as well as immersive training and education scenarios.

"The applications are endless," Bringsjord said. "Imagine being able to step into a simulation environment in which you interact with synthetic characters as sophisticated as those seen in Star Trek's holodeck. Imagine a hostage situation: How do you prepare for negotiating with a terrorist holding a hostage? Now, it's textbook and playacting. But what if you could enter the holodeck and match wits with a synthetic character that has the ability to reason in earnest about your mind, and about what you're trying to do? This is actually a demo we're considering trying to engineer," he said.

As Eddie operates entirely on formal logic and well-defined theorems, reasoning is not automatically fast, Bringsjord said, explaining the need for clever engineering and high-performance hardware.

This research is supported by IBM and other outside sponsors, and requires the use of Rensselaer's Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI), which provides more than 100 teraflops of computing power through massively parallel Blue Gene supercomputers, POWER-based Linux clusters, and AMD Opteron processor-based clusters.

Anthony van den Pol, professor of neurosurgery at Yale School of Medicine and his team engineered a virus that can find its way through the vascular system and kill deadly brain tumors.

Each year 200,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with a brain tumor, and metastatic tumors and glioblastomas make up a large part of these tumors. There currently is no cure for these types of tumors, and they generally result in death within months.

Current treatments include chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, which can prolong life for a few months, but generally fail because they don’t eliminate all of the cancer cells.

To test their tumor-targeting virus, van den Pol and his team transplanted tumor tissue from human or mouse brains into the brains of mice. They then inoculated the mice with a lab-created vesicular stomatitis virus, a replicating virus distantly related to the rabies virus.

“Three days after inoculation, the tumors were completely or almost completely infected with the virus and the tumor cells were dying or dead,” van den Pol said. “We were able to target different types of cancer cells. Within the same time frame, normal mouse brain cells or normal human brain cells transplanted into mice were spared. This underlines the virus’ potential therapeutic value against multiple types of brain cancers.”

The team also tested targeting brain tumors with the virus through the olfactory nerve and found it led to complete infection of the tumor. After infection, the tumor cells disappeared from the olfactory bulb, van den Pol said.

I'm not really a big fan of Steampunk. But I must say that Dave Veloz really did a great job on modding this computer setup. This is what a computer would have looked like if it was build by the scientist in the movie 'The Timemachine' if he had seen one in the future and gone back to his time to build one for himself.



Especially the modded Apple Mini drew my attention. Great job Dave! It was a wedding present for his wife to be Jenn. But what if Apple upgrades the Mini? Let's hope it fits in the old housing.