Patrick Cox is the author of a very interesting article on Contrarianprofits.com. In the post, Cox makes the case that the time is ripe for large-scale adoption of robotics in both civilian and military applications.The latter is old news: in previous posts, we looked at the growing opportunities, and concerns, of robotic applications in dangerous (or dangerously boring) domains. Read the rest of this entry »

Replicators in Europe

In the 7th Framework Program of the European Community a project has started in 2008, in which modular robots are developed by many research parties in Europe (Universität Stuttgart, Universität Graz, Universität Karlsruhe, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Sheffield Hallam University, Fraunhofer Gesellshaft, Institut Mikroelektronickych Aplikaci, Ubisense, Ceske Vysoke Uceni Technicke v Praze and Almende B.V., see http://www.replicators.eu) that go beyond the swarm mode and are able to form robot organisms.  Read the rest of this entry »

Reverse engineering the brain?

In a recent invited talk at the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, Lloyd Watts, neuroscientist turned entrepreneur (founder, chairman and CTO of Audience Inc., a Silicon Valley company that commercializes technology derived from auditory neuroscience research), presented his “strategy” on how to go about a gargantuan task: reverse-engineering the brain. With a military strategy analogy, the problem is the following: what is the best way to occupy an enemy territory? Should the invading army occupy simultaneously the target territory from all its borders, or should all troops focus on a narrow strip of land, occupy it, consolidate the territory and exploit its resources, and then move on to the next target? Lloyd Watts, the neuroscientist-entrepreneur, seems to suggest that the second strategy is the winning one.

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In december 2008, a video post has been published on Abovetopsecret.com  with the title “DARPA & IBM building a “global brain” “cognitive computer” for “monitoring people”. In this video, the leader of the IBM SyNAPSE project, Dharmendra Modha, talks about SyNAPSE.

This is an excerpt from the video:
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Making Computers Based on the Human Brain
How the biology of gray matter is having an increasing influence on computer design

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