DARPA Looks To New Form Of Computation That Mimics The Human Brain

The next frontier for the robotics industry has always been to build machines that think like humans. Scientists have pursued that elusive goal for decades, and some now believe that they are now extremely close to achieving the goal.

Now, a Pentagon-funded team of researchers has constructed a tiny machine that might allow robots to act independently.

Compared to traditional artificial intelligence systems that rely on conventional computer programming, this one “looks and ‘thinks’ like a human brain,” said James K. Gimzewski, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Gimsewski is a member of the team that has been working under sponsorship of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on a program called Physical Intelligence.

The stated objective of the program is: “The analysis domain is to develop analytical tools to support the development of human-engineered physically intelligent systems and to understand physical intelligence in the natural world”.

This technology could be the secret to making robots that are truly autonomous, Gimzewski said during a conference call hosted by Technolink, a Los Angeles-based industry group.

Gimzewski says his project does not use standard robot hardware with integrated circuitry. The device that his team constructed is capable, without being programmed like a traditional robot, of performing actions similar to humans.

What sets this new device apart from any others is that it has nano-scale interconnected wires that perform billions of connections like a human brain, and is capable of remembering information, Gimzewski said. Each connection is a synthetic synapse. A synapse is what allows a neuron to pass an electric or chemical signal to another cell. Because its structure is so complex, most artificial intelligence projects so far have been unable to replicate it.

“Physical Intelligence” devices would not require a human controller the way a robot does, said Gimzewski. The applications of this technology for the military would be far reaching.

For instance an aircraft, for example, would be able to learn and explore the terrain and work its way through the environment without human intervention, he said. These machines would be able to process information in ways that would be unimaginable with current computers.

Artificial intelligence research over the past five decades has not been able to generate human-like reasoning or cognitive functions, said Gimzewski. DARPA’s program is the most ambitious he has seen to date. “It’s an off-the-wall approach,” he added.

Studies of the brain have shown that one of its key traits is self-organization. “That seems to be a prerequisite for autonomous behavior,” he said. “Rather than move information from memory to processor, like conventional computers, this device processes information in a totally new way.” This could represent a revolutionary breakthrough in robotic systems, said Gimzewski.

A Model of Functional Brain Connectivity and Background Noise as a Biomarker for Cognitive Phenotypes: Application to Autism

We present an efficient approach to discriminate between typical and atypical brains from macroscopic neural dynamics recorded as magnetoencephalograms (MEG). Our approach is based on the fact that spontaneous brain activity can be accurately described with stochastic dynamics, as a multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process (mOUP). By fitting the data to a mOUP we obtain: 1) the functional connectivity matrix, corresponding to the drift operator, and 2) the traces of background stochastic activity (noise) driving the brain. We applied this method to investigate functional connectivity and background noise in juvenile patients (n = 9) with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and compared them to age-matched juvenile control subjects (n = 10). Our analysis reveals significant alterations in both functional brain connectivity and background noise in ASD patients. The dominant connectivity change in ASD relative to control shows enhanced functional excitation from occipital to frontal areas along a parasagittal axis. Background noise in ASD patients is spatially correlated over wide areas, as opposed to control, where areas driven by correlated noise form smaller patches. An analysis of the spatial complexity reveals that it is significantly lower in ASD subjects. Although the detailed physiological mechanisms underlying these alterations cannot be determined from macroscopic brain recordings, we speculate that enhanced occipital-frontal excitation may result from changes in white matter density in ASD, as suggested in previous studies. We also venture that long-range spatial correlations in the background noise may result from less specificity (or more promiscuity) of thalamo-cortical projections. All the calculations involved in our analysis are highly efficient and outperform other algorithms to discriminate typical and atypical brains with a comparable level of accuracy. Altogether our results demonstrate a promising potential of our approach as an efficient biomarker for altered brain dynamics associated with a cognitive phenotype.

New research reveals how elephants ‘see’ the world

Think Elephants International, a not-for-profit organization that strives to promote elephant conservation through scientific research, education programming and international collaborations, today announced its latest study, “Visual Cues Given by Humans are Not Sufficient for Asian Elephants (Elephas Maximus) to Find Hidden Food.”

This study has been published in the April 17, 2013 issue of PLOS ONE, an international publication that reports original research from all disciplines within science and medicine. Designed in collaboration with and co-authored by 12-14 year old students from East Side Middle School in NYC, the study revealed that elephants were not able to recognize visual cues provided by humans, although they were more responsive to vocal commands. These findings may directly impact protocols for future efforts to conserve elephants, which are in danger of extinction in this century due to increased poaching and human/elephant conflict.

The publication of this paper is the climax of a three-year endeavor to create a comprehensive middle school curriculum that brings elephants into classrooms as a way to educate young people about conservation by getting them directly involved in work with endangered species. This research tested whether elephants could follow visual, social cues (pointing and gazing) to find food hidden in one of two buckets. The elephants failed at this task, but were able to follow vocal commands telling them which bucket contained the food. These results suggest that elephants may navigate their physical world in ways that primates and dogs, prior subjects of animal cognition studies, do not.

"Dogs have a great sense of smell, but appear to be able to follow human pointing as a way of finding food," said Joshua Plotnik, PhD, founder and CEO of Think Elephants. "Perhaps elephants’ sense of smell is one of their primary sensory modalities, meaning that they may use it preferentially when navigating their physical worlds."

In the field of animal cognition, there has been considerable attention focused on how animals interact with each other and humans. Particularly, there is a lot of interest in how dogs are able to read social cues to understand what people see, know or want. Remarkably, non-human primates such as chimpanzees are not good at this, suggesting it may be that through domestication or long-term human contact, dogs have developed a capacity for following social cues provided by people. Think Elephants aimed to test elephants on this because they are a wild, non-domesticated species that, in captivity in Thailand, are in relatively constant contact with humans.

The study’s findings have important implications for future protection protocols for wild elephants.

According to Dr. Plotnik, “If elephants are not primarily using sight to navigate their natural environment, human-elephant conflict mitigation techniques must consider what elephants’ main sensory modalities are and how elephants think so that they might be attracted or deterred effectively as a situation requires. The loss of natural habitat, poaching for ivory, and human-elephant conflict are serious threats to the sustainability of elephants in the wild. Put simply, we will be without elephants, and many other species in the wild, in less than 50 years if the world does not act.”

To mitigate this, Dr. Plotnik suggests further attention to research on elephant behavior and an increase in educational programming are needed, particularly in Asia where the market for ivory is so strong. Think Elephants’ education program in NYC is a pilot that will be expanding to Thai schools later in 2013.

The students were integrally involved in the development of this study, even helping to design some of the experimental control conditions. The study was carried out at Think Elephants’ field site in northern Thailand, and students participated via webcam conversation and direct web-links to the elephant camp.

This shows that collaborations that include both academics and young students can be productive, informative and exciting.

According to Jen Pokorny, PhD, Think Elephants’ head of education programs, “We are so proud of our pilot program with East Side Middle School and hope to use this as a model for other schools throughout the state and country. This wonderful group of students had an opportunity that very few young people have and, as a result, are now published co-authors on a significant piece of animal behavior research. They were integrally involved in the development of the study, even helping to design some of the experimental control conditions. Think Elephants is committed to showcasing these productive, informative and exciting student collaborations, and we believe similar studies can help to change the way in which young people observe and appreciate their global environment.”

Negative Thoughts Can Be Contagious

The way the people around us respond to stressful events — whether those people react negatively or positively — may be contagious when we are in the midst of a major life transition, a new study says.

What’s more, the increased risk of depression that comes with negative thinking also seems to rub off during these times, the study found.

For the study, researchers looked at 103 pairs of college-freshmen roommates’ “cognitive vulnerability,” which is the tendency to think that negative events are a reflection of a person’s own deficiency or that they will lead to more negative events. Those with high cognitive vulnerability are at an increased risk of depression, studies have found.

"We found that participants’ level of cognitive vulnerability was significantly influenced by their roommates’ level of cognitive vulnerability, and vice versa," the researchers wrote. All roommates in the study were selected randomly; students did not choose their roommates. Only three months of living together was needed for this contagiousness to be seen.

The researchers also found that those who experienced an increase in cognitive vulnerability during the first three months of college had nearly twice the level of depressive symptoms at six months, compared with those who did not experience an increase in cognitive vulnerability, according to the study. The effect was particularly strong when participants were under high-stress conditions.

Prior to this study, it was thought that cognitive vulnerability didn’t change much once a person passed early adolescence. However, the new findings suggest that during big transitions in life — when a person is continually exposed to a new social situation — cognitive vulnerability can be altered, the researchers said.

They noted that genetic, biological and environmental factors all likely play a role in a person’s level of cognitive vulnerability.

Further research is needed to determine whether cognitive vulnerability may change over time, the researchers said, noting that college freshmen are in a unique social environment. 

"Our findings are consistent with a growing number of studies that have found that many psychological and biological factors previously thought to be set in stone by adulthood continue to be malleable,” the researchers said.

The study was published online April 16 in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

Learned helplessness in flies and the roots of depression

When faced with impossible circumstances beyond their control, animals, including humans, often hunker down as they develop sleep or eating disorders, ulcers, and other physical manifestations of depression. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 18 show that the same kind of thing happens to flies.

The study is a step toward understanding the biological basis for depression and presents a new way for testing antidepressant drugs, the researchers say. The discovery of such symptoms in an insect shows that the roots of depression are very deep indeed.

"Depressions are so devastating because they go back to such a basic property of behavior," says Martin Heisenberg of the Rudolf Virchow Center in Würzburg, Germany.

Heisenberg says that the idea for the study came out of a lengthy discussion with a colleague about how to ask whether flies can feel fear. Franco Bertolucci, a coauthor on the study, had found that flies can rapidly learn to suppress innate behaviors, a phenomenon that is part of learned helplessness.

The researchers now show that flies experiencing uncomfortable levels of heat will walk to escape it. But if the flies realize that the heat is beyond their control and can’t be avoided, they will stop responding, walking more slowly and taking longer and more frequent rests, as if they were “depressed.”

Intriguingly, female flies slow down more under those stressful circumstances than males do. It’s not clear exactly what that means, but Heisenberg explains, “if we realize that the fly trapped in a strange, dark box, unable to get rid of the dangerous heat pulses, has to find a compromise between saving energy and not missing any chance of escape, we can understand that such a compromise may come out differently for males and females, as their resources and goals in life are different.”

Heisenberg’s team now intends to explore other questions, such as: How long does the flies’ depression-like state last? How does it affect other behaviors, like courtship and aggression? What is happening in their brain? And more.

Heisenberg says that the findings are a reminder of a lesson that children’s books are often best at showing: “Animals have lots in common with us humans. They breathe the same air, share many of the same resources, actively explore space, and have distinct social roles. Their brains serve the same purpose, too: they help them to do the right thing.”

Brain Activation in Motor Sequence Learning Is Related to the Level of Native Cortical Excitability

Cortical excitability may be subject to changes through training and learning. Motor training can increase cortical excitability in motor cortex, and facilitation of motor cortical excitability has been shown to be positively correlated with improvements in performance in simple motor tasks. Thus cortical excitability may tentatively be considered as a marker of learning and use-dependent plasticity. Previous studies focused on changes in cortical excitability brought about by learning processes, however, the relation between native levels of cortical excitability on the one hand and brain activation and behavioral parameters on the other is as yet unknown. In the present study we investigated the role of differential native motor cortical excitability for learning a motor sequencing task with regard to post-training changes in excitability, behavioral performance and involvement of brain regions. Our motor task required our participants to reproduce and improvise over a pre-learned motor sequence. Over both task conditions, participants with low cortical excitability (CElo) showed significantly higher BOLD activation in task-relevant brain regions than participants with high cortical excitability (CEhi). In contrast, CElo and CEhi groups did not exhibit differences in percentage of correct responses and improvisation level. Moreover, cortical excitability did not change significantly after learning and training in either group, with the exception of a significant decrease in facilitatory excitability in the CEhi group. The present data suggest that the native, unmanipulated level of cortical excitability is related to brain activation intensity, but not to performance quality. The higher BOLD mean signal intensity during the motor task might reflect a compensatory mechanism in CElo participants.