What is Artificial Intelligence?

A view of the brain in cortical simulation using BlueMatter algorithm that exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture

The IBM Cognitive team has recently announced a significant progress in the development of the Cat-brain based computing system that mimics the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, while rivaling the brain's low power and energy consumption and compact size.

The team led by the IBM Research Almaden, has made a significant advancement in the cortical simulation and an algorithm called BlueMatter, that synthesizes neurological data. These two major milestones indicate the feasibility of building a cognitive computing chip.

These progress will charter a unique area in exploring the computational dynamics of the brain, and move closer to its goal of building a compact, low-power synaptronic chip using nanotechnology and advances in phase change memory and magnetic tunnel junctions.

The cognitive team built a cortical simulator that incorporates a number of innovations in computation, memory, communication as well as details from neurophysiology and neuroanatomy in order to perform the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain in large scale. After which, they combined the algorithm with the cortical simulator to experiment with various mathematical hypotheses of brain function.

Click here to read more about Cat-Brain Based Computing, Cortical Simulation, BlueMatter algorithm and Blue Gene Supercomputing Architecture.

Cognitive Anteater Robotics Lab, CARL was the name given to this robot with digital neurons programmed from real rat brains

Carl short for Cognitive Anteater Robotics Laboratory is the name given to the robot that was designed to think and act like a human being. His brain was modeled out from a rodent's brain, in order for researchers at Irvine and San Diego to study how humans adapt to the changes in their environment.

It has the ears of rodents, and it’s thinking with a computerized model of a rodent brain and interacting with the world through a “biologically plausible nervous system. Carls brain was programmed from brain recordings of real rats, and when it learns to adapt to the behaviors in the environment, researchers hope they can make further inferences how human brains work.

A collaborative study with researchers at UCSD ANDREA CHIBA, Douglas Nitz and Angela Yu, will evaluate the decision making capacity in rodents by altering their environment quickly and forcing them to adapt to this change.

Further development of this research will not only focus on medical applications, but also promises an advanced future for robotics research, allowing robots to act more humanly in complex and variable environments.

Click here to read more about Neurobotics, Robot with Digital Neurons, and CARL.

The left brain image shows the area of compromised white matter (blue area) among poor readers relative to good readers at the beginning of the study. The center brain image shows the area where the structural integrity increased (red/yellow area) among poor readers who received the instruction, and it is very similar to the initially compromised area. The right brain image shows that following the instruction, there were no differences between the good and poor readers with respect to the integrity of their white matter.

Dyslexic children are poor readers. Possibly because their brains' neural networks are wired differently than that of normal children. Cognitive scientists say, they are picture readers, so they learn to read very slowly when words are not defined by pictures and sounds.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Timothy Keller and Marcel Just have found evidence of possible brain rewiring after an intensive remedial sessions to improve reading skills in young children. The evidence showed an improvement in dyslexic brain's structure with respect to the white matter, the brain tissue that carries signals between sections of grey matter, where information is processed.

The experiment commenced by scanning the brains of 72 children using fMRI, 47 of them were good readers and 25 were poor. The good readers did not receive the 100-hour remedial training, while the group of poor readers underwent the remedial reading session.

After completion, all the 72 subjects' brains were re-scanned. The 47 good readers did not show an increase in the brain tissue while the other 25 showed the white matter in their brains has increased significantly correlating to an improvement in their reading skills. "The children who showed the most white matter change also showed the most improvement in reading ability, confirming the link between the brain tissue alteration and reading progress", researchers said.

Click here to read more about First Evidence of Brain Rewiring, Behavioral Training, Remedial Reading Treatment and Dyslexia.

It was in the news in mid-November 1999, a car accident left a 16-year old teenager totally paralyzed. Erick Ramsey could not move any part of his body; could not blink his eyes and could not even speak a single letter. He was a total wreck 10 years ago. But, now he is like a little child learning his first two words "mama" and "dada".

Thanks to neuroscience genius, Dr. Philip Kennedy, a pioneer in the field of brain-computer interface (BCI) research. He dedicated his expertise in order to develop a system that interprets Erik Ramsey's thoughts and translates them into speech. If successful, this would be the first brain-computer interface with the speech technology.

Several electrodes were connected directly into the boy's premotor cortex, a region of the brain that controls movement of the mouth, lips, tongue, and jaw. Kennedy developed a matrix of six words: heat, hid, hat, hut, hoot, and hot. that represented the major English vowel sounds. During the tests, he made Erik think of these words by saying in his mind the word uh-ee. As he does, a green cursor jumps across the matrix from hut to heat, and a sound booms out of the speaker "uuuhahuuuuhaheeeeeeee." That was the sound of Erik's brain, saying those words.Read more.

With Erick making a good progress in the BCI speech system, another scientist joined the project in 2006. Frank Guenther, a computational neuroscientist at Boston University, helped Kennedy develop a computer decoder that could turn those patterns into a prosthetic voice.

Click here to read more about Brain-Computer Speech Decoder, Erik Ramsey, Brain Implant, Neuroscience, and Prosthetic Voice

Read the full Erick Ramsey story.

simulated game using brain waves (by Melissa Folks, learning specialist)

Video games and/or computer games are said to disturb the learning behaviors of children in school. Contrary to what is believed to be the villain in children's poor performance in school, is actually helping kids focus more in their studies. But, of course, these computer games should be educational, meaning it shouldn't include any violent scenes.

Several mind over game studies have already proven their hypothesis. And in a recent experiment conducted at a London primary school for children with learning and attention difficulties, scientists studied the learning behaviors of children by making them concentrate over their own brain waves as they see them on the computer.

Two electrodes were attached one to the ear and other to the scalp. Electrodes were used to measure electrical activities of the part of the brain where millions of neural activity occurs. The captured electrical signals are seen as "waves".

The study suggests that "lots of theta waves mean you're drowsy, low to medium frequency beta waves are good for calm, focused attention and flexibility, while lots of high frequency beta waves mean you're excited or anxious"

Furthermore, when the brain finds the right balance of all three wave patterns simultaneously, the subject is said to have success in the simulated game, that is in a maze his or "her character is going around eating dots, making beeps and getting points". This is called neurofeedback.

Click here to read more about Brain Games, Neurofeedback, Brain Waves