The name “Parnassus” in literature typically refers to its distinction as the home of poetry, literature, and learning; the Montparnasse area in Paris, France, for example, bears its name from the many literature students who recited poetry in the streets, who as a result nicknamed it “(le) Mont Parnasse”.
It seems that London, during Olympics 2012, will be the home of poetry. According to the April 17, 2012 article by Alison Flood for the Guardian, the Poetry Paranassus, poets from around the world have confirmed their presence at the event on the banks of the river Thames. From the article,
In what is being called the biggest gathering of poets in world history, the writers will appear at Poetry Parnassus, a week-long series of poetic events at the end of June led by the Southbank Centre’s artist-in-residence Armitage and artistic director Jude Kelly and inspired by epinicians, poetry commissioned as part of the ancient Olympic Games in Greece. It will see poets, rappers, storytellers and praise singers reading their work in more than 50 languages, from Haitian creole to Maori, with the event to open as 100,000 poems are dropped from a helicopter on to the waiting crowd. Many of the poets will be travelling to the UK for the first time.
A 24-year-old poet from Kazakhstan will be alongside an 83-year-old poet from Luxemburg. In addition, there will be Ireland’s Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Laureate, Kim Jong-il’s exiled former court poet, Jan Jin Seong, and Canada’s Karen Solie.
You can find the list of poets and the countries they will be representing here.
Project organizers are searching for more poets as they are looking for representatives from 23 more countries. If you have a suggestion for a poet from these countries (from the article),
… Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Dominica, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Madagascar, Mali, Monaco, Namibia, Nauru, Niger, Palau, Papua New Guinea, American Samoa, Seychelles, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Timor-Leste and Vanuatu
This sounds like it will be an extraordinary event (from the article),
It will see poets, rappers, storytellers and praise singers reading their work in more than 50 languages, from Haitian creole to Maori, with the event to open as 100,000 poems are dropped from a helicopter on to the waiting crowd.
Poetry translators and interpreters based in the UK are invited to be part of Poetry Parnassus. … Poetry Parnassus will give you the chance to work with highly acclaimed poets from all around the world, sharing their writing with UK audiences and making this landmark festival a success.
The translator’s registration/application form is here.
The free event (no tickets are required) runs from June 26 – July 1, 2012 according to the London 2012 Festival website.
For anyone who’s curious about the Canadian poet who will be attending, Karen Solie (from the Wikipedia essay),
Born in Moose Jaw [1966], Solie grew up on the family farm in southwest Saskatchewan. Over the years, she has worked as a farm hand, an espresso jerk, a groundskeeper, a newspaper reporter/photographer, an academic research assistant, and an English teacher. She currently resides in Toronto, Ontario.
Solie won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2010. From the June 4, 2010 article by Vit Wagner for thestar.com
At a gala in Toronto’s Distillery District on Thursday night, the Saskatchewan-bred, Toronto-based Solie was named winner of the Griffin’s Canadian honours, joining the ranks of past winners that include Margaret Avison, Robin Blaser and, last year, A.F. Moritz.
This year, poetry-loving arts patron Scott Griffin permanently upped the cash awards that come with his prizes (one for Canadian verse, one for international) from $50,000 to $75,000, which Solie won for her work Pigeon. Ireland’s Eilean Ni Chuilleanain was honoured for Sun-fish.
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The cash reward was boosted as part of the 10th anniversary of the prize, one of the world’s most lucrative for a single volume of verse. Speaking about the impact of his prize earlier this year, Griffin told the Star, “The purpose of the prize was to bring some profile to poets, who were virtually at the back of the bus — and maybe not even on the bus. And I think it has done that.”
Here’s a video of Karen Solie reading a selection from her award-winning book of verse, Pigeon,
About 20 or 25 years ago there was a robot/cyborg/ etc. show at the local art gallery. The curators of the show noted that people with hip and/or knee replacements, pacemakers, deep brain stimulators, etc. were cyborgs. It was along time ago and I wasn’t sure I remembered rightly so I checked and found this in a Wikipedia essay,
A cyborg, short for “cybernetic organism”, is a being with both biological and artificial (e.g. electronic, mechanical or robotic) parts. The term was coined in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline used it in an article about the advantages of self-regulating human-machine systems in outer space.D. S. Halacy’s Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman in 1965 featured an introduction which spoke of a “new frontier” that was “not merely space, but more profoundly the relationship between ‘inner space’ to ‘outer space’ – a bridge…between mind and matter.”
My mother became a cyborg five years ago when she had a hip replacement. I don’t believe that I will ever share that information with her; she simply wouldn’t want to know.
Since her operation, I’ve become somewhat interested in hip replacements. From the April 19, 2012 news item by Anne Trafton on Nanowerk about research at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology),
Every year, more than a million Americans receive an artificial hip or knee prosthesis. Such implants are designed to last many years, but in about 17 percent of patients who receive a total joint replacement, the implant eventually loosens and has to be replaced early, which can cause dangerous complications for elderly patients.
To help minimize these burdensome operations, a team of MIT chemical engineers has developed a new coating for implants that could help them better adhere to the patient’s bone, preventing premature failure.
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The coating, which induces the body’s own cells to produce bone that fixes the implant in place, could also be used to help heal fractures and to improve dental implants, according to Hammond and lead author Nisarg Shah, a graduate student in Hammond’s [Paula Hammond, senior author] lab.
Artificial hips consist of a metal ball on a stem, connecting the pelvis and femur. The ball rotates within a plastic cup attached to the inside of the hip socket. Similarly, artificial knees consist of plates and a stem that enable movement of the femur and tibia. To secure the implant, surgeons use bone cement, a polymer that resembles glass when hardened. In some cases, this cement ends up cracking and the implant detaches from the bone, causing chronic pain and loss of mobility for the patient.
“Typically, in such a case, the implant is removed and replaced, which causes tremendous secondary tissue loss in the patient that wouldn’t have happened if the implant hadn’t failed,” Shah says. “Our idea is to prevent failure by coating these implants with materials that can induce native bone that is generated within the body. That bone grows into the implant and helps fix it in place.”
The new coating consists of a very thin film, ranging from 100 nanometers to one micron, composed of layers of materials that help promote rapid bone growth. One of the materials, hydroxyapatite, is a natural component of bone, made of calcium and phosphate. This material attracts mesenchymal stem cells from the bone marrow and provides an interface for the formation of new bone. The other layer releases a growth factor that stimulates mesenchymal stem cells to transform into bone-producing cells called osteoblasts.
The Hammond lab has kindly made an image of the hydroxyapatite nanoparticles,
Hydroxyapatite nanoparticles are incorporated into multilayer coatings for faster bone tissue growth. Image courtesy of the Hammond Lab
I hope that this improved method for hip implants will be in hospitals in foreseeable future.
ETA April 20, 2012: You can check out Dexter Johnson’s April 19, 2012 posting on Nanoclast (on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE] website).
Canada’s National Film Board (NFB) has seven nominations for Webby Awards according to the April 12, 2012 posting by Carolyne Weldon on the NFB blog,
What do a bear, a parable on human language, a Northern reserve, and a brother in the army have in common?
Why, they’re the subjects of the 4 NFB/interactive projects nominated for 2012 Webby Awards, of course!
The Webby Awards, which people sometimes refer to as the “Oscars of the Web”, are international awards presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) for excellence on the Internet. Saluting greatness in Websites, Interactive Advertising, Online Film & Video and Mobile & Apps, they are, in short, a huge honour.
This year, 4 of our interactive projects have been nominated for a grand total of 7 awards. (Lucky 7! We’re tickled pink!)
Weldon goes on to describe and provide links to the four nominees for interactive projects and notes that the Webbys will have two winners in each category, one selected by the critics and the other by the public. You have until April 26, 2012 to vote here where you can view all the nominees. You do have to sign up/register to vote.
For anyone not familiar with the Webbys, 2012 marks the 16th year the event has been held. This year, the awards will be given out on May 21, 2012 in New York, New York. The night is the culmination of the May 14-21, 2012 Internet Week.
I’ve decided to do a roundup of the various brain-related projects I’ve been coming across in the last several months. I was inspired by this article (Real-life Jedi: Pushing the limits of mind control) by Katia Moskvitch,
You don’t have to be a Jedi to make things move with your mind.
Granted, we may not be able to lift a spaceship out of a swamp like Yoda does in The Empire Strikes Back, but it is possible to steer a model car, drive a wheelchair and control a robotic exoskeleton with just your thoughts.
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We are standing in a testing room at IBM’s Emerging Technologies lab in Winchester, England.
On my head is a strange headset that looks like a black plastic squid. Its 14 tendrils, each capped with a moistened electrode, are supposed to detect specific brain signals.
In front of us is a computer screen, displaying an image of a floating cube.
As I think about pushing it, the cube responds by drifting into the distance.
Moskvitch goes on to discuss a number of projects that translate thought into movement via various pieces of equipment before she mentions a project at Brown University (US) where researchers are implanting computer chips into brains,
Headsets and helmets offer cheap, easy-to-use ways of tapping into the mind. But there are other,
Imagine some kind of a wireless computer device in your head that you’ll use for mind control – what if people hacked into that”
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At Brown Institute for Brain Science in the US, scientists are busy inserting chips right into the human brain.
The technology, dubbed BrainGate, sends mental commands directly to a PC.
Subjects still have to be physically “plugged” into a computer via cables coming out of their heads, in a setup reminiscent of the film The Matrix. However, the team is now working on miniaturising the chips and making them wireless.
The purpose of the first phase of the pilot clinical study of the BrainGate2 Neural Interface System is to obtain preliminary device safety information and to demonstrate the feasibility of people with tetraplegia using the System to control a computer cursor and other assistive devices with their thoughts. Another goal of the study is to determine the participants’ ability to operate communication software, such as e-mail, simply by imagining the movement of their own hand. The study is invasive and requires surgery.
Individuals with limited or no ability to use both hands due to cervical spinal cord injury, brainstem stroke, muscular dystrophy, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or other motor neuron diseases are being recruited into a clinical study at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Stanford University Medical Center. Clinical trial participants must live within a three-hour drive of Boston, MA or Palo Alto, CA. Clinical trial sites at other locations may be opened in the future. The study requires a commitment of 13 months.
They have been recruiting since at least November 2011, from the Nov. 14, 2011 news item by Tanya Lewis on MedicalXpress,
Stanford University researchers are enrolling participants in a pioneering study investigating the feasibility of people with paralysis using a technology that interfaces directly with the brain to control computer cursors, robotic arms and other assistive devices.
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The pilot clinical trial, known as BrainGate2, is based on technology developed at Brown University and is led by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brown and the Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The researchers have now invited the Stanford team to establish the only trial site outside of New England.
Under development since 2002, BrainGate is a combination of hardware and software that directly senses electrical signals in the brain that control movement. The device — a baby-aspirin-sized array of electrodes — is implanted in the cerebral cortex (the outer layer of the brain) and records its signals; computer algorithms then translate the signals into digital instructions that may allow people with paralysis to control external devices.
Confusingly, there seemto be two BrainGate organizations. One appears to be a research entity where a number of institutions collaborate and the other is some sort of jointly held company. From the About Us webpage of the BrainGate research entity,
In the late 1990s, the initial translation of fundamental neuroengineering research from “bench to bedside” – that is, to pilot clinical testing – would require a level of financial commitment ($10s of millions) available only from private sources. In 2002, a Brown University spin-off/startup medical device company, Cyberkinetics, Inc. (later, Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, Inc.) was formed to collect the regulatory permissions and financial resources required to launch pilot clinical trials of a first-generation neural interface system. The company’s efforts and substantial initial capital investment led to the translation of the preclinical research at Brown University to an initial human device, the BrainGate Neural Interface System [Caution: Investigational Device. Limited by Federal Law to Investigational Use]. The BrainGate system uses a brain-implantable sensor to detect neural signals that are then decoded to provide control signals for assistive technologies. In 2004, Cyberkinetics received from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the first of two Investigational Device Exemptions (IDEs) to perform this research. Hospitals in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Illinois were established as clinical sites for the pilot clinical trial run by Cyberkinetics. Four trial participants with tetraplegia (decreased ability to use the arms and legs) were enrolled in the study and further helped to develop the BrainGate device. Initial results from these trials have been published or presented, with additional publications in preparation.
While scientific progress towards the creation of this promising technology has been steady and encouraging, Cyberkinetics’ financial sponsorship of the BrainGate research – without which the research could not have been started – began to wane. In 2007, in response to business pressures and changes in the capital markets, Cyberkinetics turned its focus to other medical devices. Although Cyberkinetics’ own funds became unavailable for BrainGate research, the research continued through grants and subcontracts from federal sources. By early 2008 it became clear that Cyberkinetics would eventually need to withdraw completely from directing the pilot clinical trials of the BrainGate device. Also in 2008, Cyberkinetics spun off its device manufacturing to new ownership, BlackRock Microsystems, Inc., which now produces and is further developing research products as well as clinically-validated (510(k)-cleared) implantable neural recording devices.
Beginning in mid 2008, with the agreement of Cyberkinetics, a new, fully academically-based IDE application (for the “BrainGate2 Neural Interface System”) was developed to continue this important research. In May 2009, the FDA provided a new IDE for the BrainGate2 pilot clinical trial. [Caution: Investigational Device. Limited by Federal Law to Investigational Use.] The BrainGate2 pilot clinical trial is directed by faculty in the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School; the research is performed in close scientific collaboration with Brown University’s Department of Neuroscience, School of Engineering, and Brown Institute for Brain Sciences, and the Rehabilitation Research and Development Service of the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs at the Providence VA Medical Center. Additionally, in late 2011, Stanford University joined the BrainGate Research Team as a clinical site and is currently enrolling participants in the clinical trial. This interdisciplinary research team includes scientific partners from the Functional Electrical Stimulation Center at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland VA Medical Center. As was true of the decades of fundamental, preclinical research that provided the basis for the recent clinical studies, funding for BrainGate research is now entirely from federal and philanthropic sources.
The BrainGate Research Team at Brown University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Stanford University, and Providence VA Medical Center comprises physicians, scientists, and engineers working together to advance understanding of human brain function and to develop neurotechnologies for people with neurologic disease, injury, or limb loss.
The BrainGate™ Co. is a privately-held firm focused on the advancement of the BrainGate™ Neural Interface System. The Company owns the Intellectual property of the BrainGate™ system as well as new technology being developed by the BrainGate company. In addition, the Company also owns the intellectual property of Cyberkinetics which it purchased in April 2009.
Meanwhile, in Europe there are two projects BrainAble and the Human Brain Project. The BrainAble project is similar to BrainGate in that it is intended for people with injuries but they seem to be concentrating on a helmet or cap for thought transmission (as per Moskovitch’s experience at the beginning of this posting). From the Feb. 28, 2012 news item on Science Daily,
In the 2009 film Surrogates, humans live vicariously through robots while safely remaining in their own homes. That sci-fi future is still a long way off, but recent advances in technology, supported by EU funding, are bringing this technology a step closer to reality in order to give disabled people more autonomy and independence than ever before.
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“Our aim is to give people with motor disabilities as much autonomy as technology currently allows and in turn greatly improve their quality of life,” says Felip Miralles at Barcelona Digital Technology Centre, a Spanish ICT research centre.
Mr. Miralles is coordinating the BrainAble* project (http://www.brainable.org/), a three-year initiative supported by EUR 2.3 million in funding from the European Commission to develop and integrate a range of different technologies, services and applications into a commercial system for people with motor disabilities.
In terms of HCI [human-computer interface], BrainAble improves both direct and indirect interaction between the user and his smart home. Direct control is upgraded by creating tools that allow controlling inner and outer environments using a “hybrid” Brain Computer Interface (BNCI) systemable to take into account other sources of information such as measures of boredom, confusion, frustration by means of the so-called physiological and affective sensors.
Furthermore, interaction is enhanced by means of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) focused on creating a proactive and context-aware environments by adding intelligence to the user’s surroundings. AmI’s main purpose is to aid and facilitate the user’s living conditions by creating proactive environments to provide assistance.
Human-Computer Interfaces are complemented by an intelligent Virtual Reality-based user interface with avatars and scenarios that will help the disabled move around freely, and interact with any sort of devices. Even more the VR will provide self-expression assets using music, pictures and text, communicate online and offline with other people, play games to counteract cognitive decline, and get trained in new functionalities and tasks.
Perhaps this video helps,
Another European project, NeuroCare, which I discussed in my March 5, 2012 posting, is focused on creating neural implants to replace damaged and/or destroyed sensory cells in the eye or the ear.
The Human Brain Project is, despite its title, a neuromorphic engineering project (although the researchers do mention some medical applications on the project’s home page) in common with the work being done at the University of Michigan/HRL Labs mentioned in my April 19, 2012 posting (A step closer to artificial synapses courtesy of memritors) about that project. From the April 11, 2012 news item about the Human Brain Project on Science Daily,
Researchers at the EPFL [Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne] have discovered rules that relate the genes that a neuron switches on and off, to the shape of that neuron, its electrical properties and its location in the brain.
The discovery, using state-of-the-art informatics tools, increases the likelihood that it will be possible to predict much of the fundamental structure and function of the brain without having to measure every aspect of it. That in turn makes the Holy Grail of modelling the brain in silico — the goal of the proposed Human Brain Project — a more realistic, less Herculean, prospect. “It is the door that opens to a world of predictive biology,” says Henry Markram, the senior author on the study, which is published this week in PLoS ONE.
Here’s a bit more about the Human Brain Project (from the home page),
Today, simulating a single neuron requires the full power of a laptop computer. But the brain has billions of neurons and simulating all them simultaneously is a huge challenge. To get round this problem, the project will develop novel techniques of multi-level simulation in which only groups of neurons that are highly active are simulated in detail. But even in this way, simulating the complete human brain will require a computer a thousand times more powerful than the most powerful machine available today. This means that some of the key players in the Human Brain Project will be specialists in supercomputing. Their task: to work with industry to provide the project with the computing power it will need at each stage of its work.
The Human Brain Project will impact many different areas of society. Brain simulation will provide new insights into the basic causes of neurological diseases such as autism, depression, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. It will give us new ways of testing drugs and understanding the way they work. It will provide a test platform for new drugs that directly target the causes of disease and that have fewer side effects than current treatments. It will allow us to design prosthetic devices to help people with disabilities. The benefits are potentially huge. As world populations grow older, more than a third will be affected by some kind of brain disease. Brain simulation provides us with a powerful new strategy to tackle the problem.
The project also promises to become a source of new Information Technologies. Unlike the computers of today, the brain has the ability to repair itself, to take decisions, to learn, and to think creatively – all while consuming no more energy than an electric light bulb. The Human Brain Project will bring these capabilities to a new generation of neuromorphic computing devices, with circuitry directly derived from the circuitry of the brain. The new devices will help us to build a new generation of genuinely intelligent robots to help us at work and in our daily lives.
The Human Brain Project builds on the work of the Blue Brain Project. Led by Henry Markram of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the Blue Brain Project has already taken an essential first towards simulation of the complete brain. Over the last six years, the project has developed a prototype facility with the tools, know-how and supercomputing technology necessary to build brain models, potentially of any species at any stage in its development. As a proof of concept, the project has successfully built the first ever, detailed model of the neocortical column, one of the brain’s basic building blocks.
The Human Brain Project is a flagship project in contention for the 1B Euro research prize that I’ve mentioned in the context of the GRAPHENE-CA flagship project (my Feb. 13, 2012 posting gives a better description of these flagship projects while mentioned both GRAPHENE-CA and another brain-computer interface project, PRESENCCIA).
Part of the reason for doing this roundup, is the opportunity to look at a number of these projects in one posting; the effect is more overwhelming than I expected.
For anyone who’s interested in Markram’s paper (open access),
Georges Khazen, Sean L. Hill, Felix Schürmann, Henry Markram. Combinatorial Expression Rules of Ion Channel Genes in Juvenile Rat (Rattus norvegicus) Neocortical Neurons. PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (4): e34786 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034786
I do have earlier postings on brains and neuroprostheses, one of the more recent ones is this March 16, 2012 posting. Meanwhile, there are new announcements from Northwestern University (US) and the US National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke). From the April 18, 2012 news item (originating from the National Institutes of Health) on Science Daily,
An artificial connection between the brain and muscles can restore complex hand movements in monkeys following paralysis, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health.
In a report in the journal Nature, researchers describe how they combined two pieces of technology to create a neuroprosthesis — a device that replaces lost or impaired nervous system function. One piece is a multi-electrode array implanted directly into the brain which serves as a brain-computer interface (BCI). The array allows researchers to detect the activity of about 100 brain cells and decipher the signals that generate arm and hand movements. The second piece is a functional electrical stimulation (FES) device that delivers electrical current to the paralyzed muscles, causing them to contract. The brain array activates the FES device directly, bypassing the spinal cord to allow intentional, brain-controlled muscle contractions and restore movement.
A new Northwestern Medicine brain-machine technology delivers messages from the brain directly to the muscles — bypassing the spinal cord — to enable voluntary and complex movement of a paralyzed hand. The device could eventually be tested on, and perhaps aid, paralyzed patients.
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The research was done in monkeys, whose electrical brain and muscle signals were recorded by implanted electrodes when they grasped a ball, lifted it and released it into a small tube. Those recordings allowed the researchers to develop an algorithm or “decoder” that enabled them to process the brain signals and predict the patterns of muscle activity when the monkeys wanted to move the ball.
These experiments were performed by Christian Ethier, a post-doctoral fellow, and Emily Oby, a graduate student in neuroscience, both at the Feinberg School of Medicine. The researchers gave the monkeys a local anesthetic to block nerve activity at the elbow, causing temporary, painless paralysis of the hand. With the help of the special devices in the brain and the arm — together called a neuroprosthesis — the monkeys’ brain signals were used to control tiny electric currents delivered in less than 40 milliseconds to their muscles, causing them to contract, and allowing the monkeys to pick up the ball and complete the task nearly as well as they did before.
“The monkey won’t use his hand perfectly, but there is a process of motor learning that we think is very similar to the process you go through when you learn to use a new computer mouse or a different tennis racquet. Things are different and you learn to adjust to them,” said Miller [Lee E. Miller], also a professor of physiology and of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Feinberg and a Sensory Motor Performance Program lab chief at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
The National Institutes of Health news item supplies a little history and background for this latest breakthrough while the Northwestern University news item offers more technical details more technical details.
You can find the researchers’ paper with this citation (assuming you can get past the paywall,
C. Ethier, E. R. Oby, M. J. Bauman, L. E. Miller. Restoration of grasp following paralysis through brain-controlled stimulation of muscles. Nature, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nature10987
I was surprised to find the Health Research Fund of Québec listed as one of the funders but perhaps Christian Ethier has some connection with the province.
Researchers from HRL Laboratories and the University of Michigan have built what they claim is a type of artificial synapse by using memristors. From the March 29, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,
In a step toward computers that mimic the parallel processing of complex biological brains, researchers from HRL Laboratories, LLC, and the University of Michigan have built a type of artificial synapse.
They have demonstrated the first functioning “memristor” array stacked on a conventional complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuit. Memristors combine the functions of memory and logic like the synapses of biological brains.
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The researchers developed a vertically integrated hybrid electronic circuit by combining the novel memristor developed at the University of Michigan with wafer scale heterogeneous process integration methodology and CMOS read/write circuitry developed at HRL. “This hybrid circuit is a critical advance in developing intelligent machines,” said HRL SyNAPSE program manager and principal investigator Narayan Srinivasa. “We have created a multi-bit fully addressable memory storage capability with a density of up to 30 Gbits/cm², which is unprecedented in microelectronics.”
Industry is seeking hybrid systems such as this one, the researchers say. Dubbed “R-RAM,” they could shatter the looming limits of Moore’s Law, which predicts a doubling of transistor density and therefore chip speed every two years.
“We’re reaching the fundamental limits of transistor scaling. This hybrid integration opens many opportunities for greater memory capacity and higher performance of conventional computers. It has great potential in future non-volatile memory that would improve upon today’s Flash, as well as reconfigurable circuits,” said Wei Lu, an associate professor at the U-M Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science whose group developed the memristor array.
This work is being done as part of a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) project titled, SyNAPSE, from the news item,
The work is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) SyNAPSE Program, or Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics. Since 2008, the HRL-led SyNAPSE team has been developing a new paradigm for “neuromorphic computing” modeled after biology.
While I haven’t come across HRL Laboratories before, I have mentioned Dr. Wei Lu and his work with memristors in my April 15, 2010 posting. As for HRL Laboratories, they were founded in 1948 by Howard Hughes as the Hughes Research Laboratories (from the company’s History page),
HRL Laboratories continues the legacy of technology advances that began at Hughes Research Laboratories, established by Howard Hughes in 1948. HRL Laboratories, LLC, was organized as a limited liability company (LLC) on December 17, 1997 and received its first patent on September 12, 2000. With more than 750 patents to our name since then and counting, we’re proud of our talented group of researchers, who continue the long tradition of technical excellence in innovation.
First Laser
One of Hughes’ most notable achievements came in 1960 with the demonstration of the world’s first laser which used a synthetic ruby crystal. The ruby laser became the basis of a multibillion-dollar laser range finder business for Hughes. In 2010 during the 50th anniversary of the laser, HRL was designated a Physics Historic Site by the American Physical Society and was selected an IEEE Milestones location as the facility where the first working laser was demonstrated.
Part of HRL’s Information and Systems Sciences Laboratory, the Center for Neural and Emergent Systems (CNES) is dedicated to exploring and developing an innovative neural & emergent computing paradigm for creating intelligent, efficient machines that can interact with, react and adapt to, evolve, and learn from their environments.
CNES was founded on the principle that all intelligent systems are open thermodynamic systems capable of self-organization, whereby structural order emerges from disorder as a natural consequence of exchanging energy, matter or entropy with their environments.
These systems exist in a state far from equilibrium where the evolution of complex behaviors cannot be readily predicted from purely local interactions between the system’s parts. Rather, the emergent order and structure of the system arises from manifold interactions of its parts. These emergent systems contain amplifying-damping loops as a result of which very small perturbations can cause large effects or no effect at all. They become adaptive when the component relationships within the system become tuned for a particular set of tasks.
CNES promotes the idea that the neural system in the brain is an example of such a complex adaptive system. A key goal of CNES is to explain how computations in the brain can help explain the realization of complex behaviors such as perception, planning, decision making and navigation due to brain-body-environment interactions.
This has reminded me of HP Labs and their work with memristors (I have many postings, too many to list here) and understand that they will be rolling out ‘memristor-based’ products in 2013. From the Oct. 8, 2011 article by Peter Clarke for EE Times,
The ‘memristor’ two-terminal non-volatile memory technology, in development at Hewlett Packard Co. since 2008, is on track to be in the market and taking share from flash memory within 18 months, according to Stan Williams, senior fellow at HP Labs.
“We have a lot of big plans for it and we’re working with Hynix Semiconductor to launch a replacement for flash in the summer of 2013 and also to address the solid-state drive market,” Williams told the audience of the International Electronics Forum, being held here [Seville, Spain].
ETA June 11, 2012: New artificial synapse development is mentioned in George Dvorsky’s June 11, 2012 posting (on the IO9.com website) about a nanoscale electrochemical switch developed by researchers in a Japan.
Dr. Michelle Oyen, team leader and lecturer in the engineering department [Cambridge University, UK], added: “Research is a funny thing because you might think that we order everything up from scientific catalogues – but actually a lot of the things we use around the lab are household items, things that we picked up at the local home goods store – so our Lego robots just fit in with that mind-set.”
That was from the March 28, 2012 news item (Growing bones with Lego) on physorg.com. Oyen’s group at Cambridge University uses the robots to grow synthetic bones as they discuss in this video (from the Cambridge University webpage hosting the March 27, 2012 news release about Lego robots in the lab [it was part of a Google Science Fair promotion],
Here’s a bit more about the robots and about the team’s bone project (from the Cambridge University news release),
“To make the bone-like substance you take a sample, then you dip it into one beaker of calcium and protein, then rinse it in some water and dip in into another beaker of phosphate and protein – you have to do it over and over and over again to build up the compound, [as seen in the video]” says Daniel Strange, one of the PhD students working on the research.
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After a bit of investigation the researchers decided to build cranes from a Lego Mindstorms robotics kit, which contains microprocessors, motors, and sensors that can be programmed to perform basic tasks on repeat. The sample is tied to string at the end of the crane which then dips it in the different solutions.
The team quickly discovered that the miniature machines made from the famous plastic blocks vastly reduced the human time cost of creating the bone samples: “the great thing about the robots is once you tell them what to do they can do it very precisely over and over again – so a day later I can come back and see a fully made sample,” says Strange.
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Bone defects can result from trauma, infection and the removal of tumours, and beyond a certain size of trauma bone is unable to regenerate itself. Current treatments include bone grafts, which can be risky and greatly increase recovery time.
The team at Cambridge are working on hydroxyapatite–gelatin composites to create synthetic bone, and the work is generating considerable interest due to the low energy costs and improved similarity to the tissues they are intended to replace.
Hydroxyapatite–gelatin composites have been proposed as suitable scaffolds for bone and dentin tissue regeneration. There is considerable interest in producing these scaffolds using biomimetic methods due to their low energy costs and potential to create composites similar to the tissues they are intended to replace. Here an existing process used to coat a surface with hydroxyapatite under near physiological conditions, the alternate soaking process, is modified and automated using an inexpensive “off the shelf” robotics kit. The process is initially used to precipitate calcium phosphate coatings. Then, in contrast to previous utilizations of the alternate soaking process, gelatin was added directly to the solutions in order to co-precipitate hydroxyapatite–gelatin composites. Samples were investigated by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and nanoindentation. Calcium phosphate coatings formed by the alternate soaking process exhibited different calcium to phosphate ratios, with correspondingly distinct structural morphologies. The coatings demonstrated an interconnected structure with measurable mechanical properties, even though they were 95% porous. In contrast, hydroxyapatite–gelatin composite coatings over 2 mm thick could be formed with little visible porosity. The hydroxyapatite–gelatin composites demonstrate a composition and mechanical properties similar to those of cortical bone.
The timing is a little tricky since ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Arts) 2012 (being held in Albuquerque) is taking place in Sept. 2012 while ISEA 2013 in Australia is taking place in June 2013, which means you might not manage to attend and/or present at both. Still, the Australian organizers must be pressed for time so they are now asking for expressions of interest from artists and organizations wanting to present performances, events, etc. in 2013.
Here are a few details about the 2013 event (from the home page),
Theme
Electronic Art – Resistance is Futile
The bleeding edge of digital art has moved from the margins to become part of the fabric of everyday life. At once ubiquitous and unnoticed, resistance to electronic art has proven futile — it now lies embedded in the heart of our contemporary cultures. ISEA2013 will bleed through Sydney, from the margin to the core. More than a series of exhibitions (although that will be part of it), the symposium events will infuse the city’s social, digital and physical infrastructure. ISEA2013 aims to create a fluid body of thought, culture, community, industry, science and technology.
Artists play an important role in this “bleeding edge.” By creatively investigating the possibilities and pushing the limits of new technologies, artists help us imaginatively experience and critically reflect on their implications for life in the 21st century. Digital electronic art is our source of innovation, the new norm in everything from publishing to TV, to radio, games, film, fashion, music, architecture, design, applications and gadgets. Ubiquitous and pervasive, digital media permeates almost all creative endeavors in everyday life and the city. The urban spaces of Sydney will provide the scene for thinking through the consequences of digital life, creative industries, and contemporary electronic art practice.
ISEA 2013 will be held from Friday, June 7 – Sunday, June 16, 2013 in Sydney, Australia.
Here’s more information from the Proposals page about Expressions of Interest,
ISEA2013 will consist of exhibitions, performances, symposium and public events to be held in Sydney from the Friday 7th of June until Sunday 16th of June 2013. It will also support residencies and associated events throughout regional NSW and across Australia leading into and out of the core event.
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Australian Artists and Organisations with large-scale projects and collaborations
In this round we are inviting applications from Australian organisations and artists who want to propose large-scale new works and developmental projects with long lead-times in the areas of Visual Arts, Theatre, Music, ATSIA, Dance, Literature and Community Partnerships. If you have an idea for a Creative Australia project that might be suitable for an outcome in ISEA2013, we encourage you to apply now.
Artists with Individual Artworks
Unless your Expression of Interest is for a large-scale project that requires long lead-times, we recommend that you apply in our next round. This next round will be an Open Call for Artworks and will have more specific categories and guidelines. We will be announcing this final round in the next few weeks.
International Artists
If you are an international artist, with an individual artwork, we recommend that you apply in the next round. However, if you have an idea for a particularly large-scale project that is dependent on funding from other sources (i.e. government, philanthropic agencies, etc.) with deadlines approaching, you should contact us to discuss your idea please contact isea@anat.org.au.
The deadline for this round is Friday, 27th April 2012 (midnight).
ISEA 2013 has not yet begun to solicit conference papers and proposals.
I gather it’s the most successful crowdfunding project Kickstarter has hosted yet. The Pebble team asked for $100,000 to realize their e-paper/ smartwatch project and have raised over $3M while they still have 30 days left in their campaign. In the kind of twist that makes one smirk, they posted the project on Kickstarter as they were unable to raise sufficient funds in Silicon Valley. From the April 16, 2012 Q&A with Alexandra Chung at Wired,
Wired: Are you surprised by the reception to Pebble? What were you hoping for when you launched on Kickstarter?
Migicovsky [Eric Migicovsky, Pebble founder and lead designer]: We were expecting $100,000 over a month, so when it came in two hours, it was a surprise. On Thursday, we were earning $80,000 an hour. By Sunday morning, we passed the Wasteland 2, which was the second most popular Kickstarter after Double Fine Adventures.
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Wired: Has the influx of funding affected your production plans? Are you changing your strategy at all?
Migicovsky: We’re basically leveling up. We had a variety of paths we could have followed. We were originally aiming for $100,000, so we had a production path that we could have followed to meet that $100,000. Now we’re following a path that is several levels higher than that.
Right now, we don’t have any specifics for where the product is being made. There are various levels of contract manufacturers, and we’re going to use a contract manufacturer. We’re moving to a one-stop shop, so we come with X amount of orders.
On the one hand, six months is not very long to bring a product to market. But we have this huge backer community that will help us get there. They are providing the funding that’s helping us make quality decisions, like spending money now on making a more aesthetically pleasing product. We’re making those decisions now.
We had a design plan with several different levels. It’s not like we are drastically altering the design. We just had “gotta haves,” like 7-day battery life, and then the “nice to haves” like more water-resistance, which are the features we’re moving into now.
Here’s a description of the pr0ject and the product from the April 17, 2012 news item on the BBC News website,
The Pebble watch reached the $1m mark in 28 hours. The firm behind the device, which has been designing smartwatches for three years, said that it was “blown away” by the support.
The watch has an electronic paper screen and connects via Bluetooth with iPhones or Android powered devices to allow users to customise the watch face and download apps.
The display stays on at all times and is backlit for night viewing. The firm says that the rechargeable battery will last a week.
It can display distance and speed for runners and cyclists, control a smartphone’s music, and show emails, messages and reminders.
The watch will go head to head with an Android-compatible device released in April by electronic giant Sony Corp. The Sony Smartwatch costs $149.99.
This video should answer a few more questions about the watch,
Migicovsky is Canadian. Originally from Vancouver, he graduated from the University of Waterloo and made his way to California. From the April 17, 2012 article by Chuck Howitt for the Record.com,
The Pebble smartwatch is a “natural evolution” of the inPulse smartwatch that Migicovsky started working on while a student at UW [University of Waterloo] in 2008.
Released in 2009, the inPulse connected wirelessly with BlackBerry smartphones to indicate when the user had an email, message or call.
Sold through a company he called Allerta Inc., sales of the inPulse have been rather modest, about 1,500 to date, admits Migicovsky.
So the 26-year-old Vancouver native set his sights on the booming iPhone and Android markets.
To crack the California market and raise funds at the same time, he applied for admission to Y Combinator, a technology incubator based in Silicon Valley, in early 2011.
Successful applicants are guaranteed about $20,000 on admission plus more funding at the end of an intense three-month internship. Migicovsky was able to raise about $375,000 by the time he left Y Combinator, which he used to start working on the Pebble.
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When he hit the venture capital market, he got a lukewarm response for the Pebble.
Most venture capitalists “have an aversion to hardware,” he said. “The general feeling is it costs more money. There is a little bit more risk.”
You can find out more about Pebble at the company website and, if you were wondering what SDK (as mentioned in the video) means, it’s Software Development Kit.
I recently wrote about e-paper in my April 3, 2012 posting titled, Folding screens at University of Toronto and EPD (electronic paper display) with LG.
The nanosponges that have been developed by a joint team of Rice University and Penn State University researchers look pretty exciting (wish I could write a better headline about them). Here’s the researcher describing them,
I find the idea that the sponges can be reused and the oil still put to use quite compelling. From the April 16, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,
… Daniel Hashim, a graduate student in the Rice lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan, said the blocks are both superhydrophobic (they hate water, so they float really well) and oleophilic (they love oil). The nanosponges, which are more than 99 percent air, also conduct electricity and can easily be manipulated with magnets.
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To demonstrate, Hashim dropped the sponge into a dish of water with used motor oil floating on top. The sponge soaked it up. He then put a match to the material, burned off the oil and returned the sponge to the water to absorb more. The robust sponge can be used repeatedly and stands up to abuse; he said a sample remained elastic after about 10,000 compressions in the lab. The sponge can also store the oil for later retrieval, he said.
“These samples can be made pretty large and can be easily scaled up,” said Hashim, holding a half-inch square block of billions of nanotubes. “They’re super-low density, so the available volume is large. That’s why the uptake of oil can be so high.” He said the sponges described in the paper can absorb more than a hundred times their weight in oil.
Nanosponges have been made from carbon nan0tubes before now (from the Feb. 8, 2010 article by Michael Berger on Nanowerk),
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are ‘strange’ nanostructures in a sense that they have both high mechanical strength and extreme flexibility. Deforming a carbon nanotube into any shape would not easily break the structure, and it recovers to original morphology in perfect manner. Researchers in China are exploiting this phenomenon by making CNT sponges consisting of a large amount of interconnected nanotubes, thus showing a combination of useful properties such as high porosity, super elasticity, robustness, and little weight (1% of water density).
The nanotube sponges not only show exciting properties as a porous material but they also are very promising to be used practically in a short time. The production method is simple and scalable, the cost is low, and the sponges can find immediate use in many fields related to water purification.
“We hope to give an example to industry that this sponge is a real thing they can prepare at low cost, make versatile products with high performance, and solve environmental problems utilizing nanotechnology,” [says] Anyuan Cao, a professor in the Department of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at Peking University …
The difference between the nanosponges made in 2010 and the ones made in 2012 is the fabrication process. From the April 16, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,
Ajayan, Rice’s Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and of chemistry, said multiwalled carbon nanotubes grown on a substrate via chemical vapor deposition usually stand up straight without any real connections to their neighbors. But the boron-introduced defects induced the nanotubes to bond at the atomic level, which tangled them into a complex network. Nanotube sponges with oil-absorbing potential have been made before (see paper in Advanced Materials: “Carbon Nanotube Sponges”), but this is the first time the covalent junctions between nanotubes in such solids have been convincingly demonstrated, he said.
“The interactions happen as they grow, and the material comes out of the furnace as a solid,” Ajayan said. [emphasis mine] “People have made nanotube solids via post-growth processing but without proper covalent connections. The advantage here is that the material is directly created during growth and comes out as a cross-linked porous network.
By comparison, the team in China used this process (from the Feb. 8, 2012 article),
The scientists synthesized the sponges by a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process during which the CNTs (multi-walled nanotubes with diameters in the range of 30 to 50nm and lengths of tens to hundreds of micrometers,) self-assembled into a porous, interconnected, three-dimensional framework.
The research team had collaborators from the US, Mexico, Japan, Spain, and Belgium. From the April 16, 2012 news release on EurekAlert,
When he was an undergraduate student of Ajayan’s at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Hashim and his classmates discovered hints of a topological solution to the problem while participating in a National Science Foundation exchange program at the Institute of Scientific Research and Technology (IPICYT) in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. The paper’s co-author, Mauricio Terrones, a professor of physics, materials science and engineering at Penn State University with an appointment at Shinshu University, Japan, led a nanotechnology lab there.
“Our goal was to find a way to make three-dimensional networks of these carbon nanotubes that would form a macroscale fabric — a spongy block of nanotubes that would be big and thick enough to be used to clean up oil spills and to perform other tasks,” Terrones said. “We realized that the trick was adding boron — a chemical element next to carbon on the periodic table — because boron helps to trigger the interconnections of the material. To add the boron, we used very high temperatures and we then ‘knitted’ the substance into the nanotube fabric.”
For anyone who would like to read further about this work (from the April 16, 2012 news release on EurekAlert),
The paper’s co-authors are Narayanan Narayanan, Myung Gwan Hahm, Joseph Suttle and Robert Vajtai, all of Rice; Jose Romo-Herrera of the University of Vigo, Spain; David Cullen and Bobby Sumpter of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Peter Lezzi and Vincent Meunier of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Doug Kelkhoff of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; E. Muñoz-Sandoval of the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Madrid; Sabyasachi Ganguli and Ajit Roy of the Air Force Research Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio (on loan from IPICYT); David Smith of Arizona State University; and Humberto Terrones of Oak Ridge National Lab and the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
The industry analysts seem very excited about the newly announced merger between two companies, Stratasys and Objet, that specialize in 3-D printing as Robert Cyran states in his April 16, 2012 posting on the Fast Company website,
Making physical items from digital files is a hot technology – maybe too hot if the market reaction to the acquisition of privately held Objet by Stratasys is any guide. Despite few synergies and an odd poison pill, the buyer’s shares rose nearly 25 percent, mainly on potential revenue synergies. But the future isn’t quite here yet.
You’ll be forgiven if you haven’t previously heard of Stratasys Inc or Objet Ltd. Stratasys, formerly a NASDAQ-traded company from Eden Prairie, MN, has a multi-pronged business selling industrial-quality 3D printers and on-demand object printing services. Objet, of Rehovot, Israel, is a 3D printer manufacturer notable for its “polyjet matrix” technology, that can print an object using multiple different materials.
Here’s why you might care that [they] announced their intention to merge: the new company, Stratasys, Ltd. could become a third major competitor in the consumer 3D printing market.
…
Where might newly-formed Stratasys, Ltd fit in? Neither originating firm is as large as 3D Systems, but both Stratasys Inc. and Objet Ltd. saw revenue increases over 30-percent for 2011, suggesting both companies are healthy. …”
3D Systems hasn’t really established its own name among consumer 3D printers, so it’s not clear that MakerBot really has any large competition yet. If Stratasys Ltd. does enter the consumer market, and if 3D Systems does make a credible entry, consumers will get to chose from at least three major technology originators. If that happens, here’s hoping that means more competition-induced innovation, and less court-bound patent squabbling.
I will add my wishes to Brown’s hope that this move stimulates innovation and not a series of law suits.
Oddly, I had already planned to write about 3-D printing last Friday, April 13, 2012, when I found a news item by Joel L. Shurkin on physorg.com which includes a good description of the 3-D process (Note: I have removed links),
Much of modern manufacturing is by reduction. Manufacturers take blocks of plastic, wood, or metal, and grind and machine away until they get the item they want. All the plastic, wood, or metal that doesn’t make it into the item is thrown away, maybe as much as 90 percent wasted.
3-D printing puts down layers of metal powders or plastics as directed by software, just as ink is laid down on paper directed by printer drivers. After each layer is completed, the tray holding the item is lowered a fraction of a millimeter and the next layer is added. Printing continues until the piece is complete.
Molten metal is allowed to cool and harden; plastics or metal powders are hardened by heat or ultraviolet light. The ingredients aren’t limited to those substances; almost anything that flows can be accommodated, even chocolate.
There is little waste, and it is possible to change the object by simply working with the software that drives the printer the way text is changed in a word processor.
In addition to the advantages there are also some disadvantages to the technology,
“Printing a few thousand iPhones on demand (and with instant updates or different versions for each phone) at a local facility that can manufacture many other products may be far more cost-effective than manufacturing ten million identical iPhones in China and shipping them to 180 countries around the world,” the Atlantic Council wrote in a report.
Clearly, not everyone would share the advantages. Manufacturing centers like China could lose millions of jobs in that sector, and their economies could be destabilized. The industries that transport the supply line and distribute the finished product would also be hit, the council wrote. Warehouses full of parts and products could be replaced by machines that print on demand.
Closer to home, I mentioned Stratasys and 3-D printing in a Sept. 28, 2011 posting about Manitoba’s Urbee car. My most recent mention of 3-D printing was in an April 10, 2012 posting about print-on-demand robots.
