Tim Barnes
Tim is a postdoctoral scholar in the Neuromorphics Lab at Boston University. He engineers software for autonomous Mars rover navigation and aircraft obstacle avoidance in collaboration with NASA.
(Homepage)
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Gotta keep ‘em separated: Neuromorphic aircraft collision avoidance
October 5, 2012Piloting ain’t easy. In addition to getting an intuition of the physics of flight, a pilot has to learn how to fly by instruments and how to fly safely with other aircraft. A speck on the horizon may be another aircraft heading straight toward the pilot, at which point changing a course is necessary before [...]
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From the ghost of emergent properties past
July 22, 2010Insightful people have noted that the brain has been difficult to understand from simple measurements because of its relative irreducibility to single neuron dynamics, suspected to be a result of emergent properties. Line up a few hundred million transistors very carefully and you get a fast but ‘stupid’ processor; bag a bunch of proteins with [...]
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Watson will beat you at Jeopardy
June 17, 2010The New York Times published an article this Monday on I.B.M.’s bid to have their Watson computer system compete in a number of televised Jeopardy! episodes, a move reminiscent of the famous set of chess matches between I.B.M.’s Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov. Reading the entire report may take some time but is definitely worthwhile [...]
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We all need control (theory)
February 7, 2010Top Gun taught us that the best and brightest pilots can perform some amazing aerobatics. Nobody seems surprised that a good pilot, with some practice, can move seamlessly from the flight maneuvers used on a Boeing 747 to those featured in Blue Angels shows. While computer autopilots have performed well in commercial aircraft for some [...]