Singularity and Futurism - The Very Latest Science and Technology News

Google's Real Goal is Artificial Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 18 May 2013 19:57:00 +0000

Motherboard - 5.16.13 by Meghan Neal

“SEARCH AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER”

Image: Google

If the sprawling opening day at Google's I/O 2013 conference made one thing clear, it’s that Google knows everything about everything.

To stay competitive in today’s tech market, Google is brandishing its biggest weapon: Data. Massive amounts of data. The company knows so much about us it can serve as a cross between a personal assistant and a brain extension. The major product announcements from the opening day of Google’s annual developer conference reflect that, all trending toward the founders’ dream of artificial intelligence. Basically, Google is reading our data so that it will be able to read our minds.

All this personalized information has the potential to be transformative—so long as you’re not concerned with things like privacy or corporate world domination. It all depends on how much creepy we’re willing to put up with in exchange for usefulness.

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Quantum Computers Are Here!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:01:00 +0000

New York Times - 5.16.13 by Quentin Hardy

Google said it had already devised machine-learning algorithms that work inside the quantum computer, which is made by D-Wave Systems of Burnaby, British Columbia.

Kim Stallknecht for The New York Times

Google and NASA are forming a laboratory to study artificial intelligence by means of computers that use the unusual properties of quantum physics. Their quantum computer, which performs complex calculations thousands of times faster than existing supercomputers, is expected to be in active use in the third quarter of this year.

The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, as the entity is called, will focus on machine learning, which is the way computers take note of patterns of information to improve their outputs. Personalized Internet search and predictions of traffic congestion based on GPS data are examples of machine learning. The field is particularly important for things like facial or voice recognition, biological behavior, or the management of very large and complex systems.

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What To Do When Your Boss is a Robot

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 13 May 2013 23:45:00 +0000

Mother Jones - May/June 2013 by Kevin Drum

Smart machines probably won't kill us all—but they'll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think.

Illustrations by Roberto Parada

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT THE FUTURE. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version. It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.

The result is paradise. Global warming is a problem of the past because computers have figured out how to generate limitless amounts of green energy and intelligent robots have tirelessly built the infrastructure to deliver it to our homes. No one needs to work anymore. Robots can do everything humans can do, and they do it uncomplainingly, 24 hours a day. Some things remain scarce—beachfront property in Malibu, original Rembrandts—but thanks to super-efficient use of natural resources and massive recycling, scarcity of ordinary consumer goods is a thing of the past. Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video games. It's up to us.

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The Man Behind the Google Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Tue, 07 May 2013 20:36:00 +0000

Wired - 5.7.13 by Daniela Hernandez

For the first time in my life, it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.

There’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm.

The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks.

About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI. “For the first time in my life,” Ng says, “it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.”

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How to Negotiate with Robots

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 05 May 2013 14:58:00 +0000

Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence - 5.5.13

Everything around us is getting smarter.

Credit: Zipcar

Vehicles, robots and other autonomous devices could soon collaborate with humans, thanks to researchers at MIT who are developing systems capable of negotiating with people to determine the best way to achieve their goals.

“In general, everything around us is getting smarter,” says Brian Williams, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and leader of the Model-Based Embedded and Robotic Systems group within MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “So we’re trying to allow people to interact with these increasingly autonomous systems in the same way that they would interact with another human.”

Ultimately such systems could be used to control autonomous vehicles, such as personal aircraft and driverless cars. But in the short term, Williams and graduate student Peng Yu are developing systems to allow conventional vehicles to work with their drivers to plan routes and schedules.

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Brain-Computer Interface Coming Closer

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:25:00 +0000

New York Times - 4/28/13 by Nick Bilton

“The current brain technologies are like trying to listen to a conversation in a football stadium from a blimp,” said John Donoghue, a neuroscientist and director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science. “To really be able to understand what is going on with the brain today you need to surgically implant an array of sensors into the brain.”

Last week, engineers sniffing around the programming code for Google Glass found hidden examples of ways that people might interact with the wearable computers without having to say a word. Among them, a user could nod to turn the glasses on or off. A single wink might tell the glasses to take a picture.

But don’t expect these gestures to be necessary for long. Soon, we might interact with our smartphones and computers simply by using our minds. In a couple of years, we could be turning on the lights at home just by thinking about it, or sending an e-mail from our smartphone without even pulling the device from our pocket. Farther into the future, your robot assistant will appear by your side with a glass of lemonade simply because it knows you are thirsty.

Researchers in Samsung’s Emerging Technology Lab are testing tablets that can be controlled by your brain, using a cap that resembles a ski hat studded with monitoring electrodes, the MIT Technology Review, the science and technology journal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported this month.

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And the dead shall rise...

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 20:42:00 +0000

BBC News - 4.23.13 by William Kremer

A doctor says people can be revived several hours after they have seemingly died. Should this change the way we think about death?

"I know it must have been a Friday around lunchtime, because we'd got back from shopping," the 63-year old says. "I can't remember getting out of the car."

Her husband David has much clearer memories of that day three months ago. He opened the front door of their Wiltshire home and saw Carol lying down, gasping for breath, the colour rapidly draining from her face.

Carol had had a cardiac arrest - her heart had stopped beating. Luckily, an elderly neighbour knew the rudiments of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and quickly began to work on her chest.

Paramedics soon took over, and at a point between 30 and 45 minutes after her collapse - no-one noted the exact time - Carol's heart started beating again.

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Google Plus Kurzweil Equals AI

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 21:17:00 +0000

Wired - 4.25.13 by Steven Levy

I’ve had a consistent date of 2029 for that vision. And that doesn’t just mean logical intelligence. It means emotional intelligence, being funny, getting the joke, being sexy, being loving, understanding human emotion. That’s actually the most complex thing we do. That is what separates computers and humans today. I believe that gap will close by 2029.

Google has always been an artificial intelligence company, so it really shouldn’t have been a surprise that Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading scientists in the field, joined the search giant late last year. Nonetheless, the hiring raised some eyebrows, since Kurzweil is perhaps the most prominent proselytizer of “hard AI,” which argues that it is possible to create consciousness in an artificial being. Add to this Google’s revelation that it is using techniques of deep learning to produce an artificial brain, and a subsequent hiring of the godfather of computer neural nets Geoffrey Hinton, and it would seem that Google is becoming the most daring developer of AI, a fact that some may consider thrilling and others deeply unsettling. Or both.

On Tuesday, Kurzweil moderated a live Google hangout tied to a release of the upcoming Will Smith film, After Earth, presumably tying the film’s futuristic concept to actual futurists. The discussion touched on the necessity of space travel and the imminent resolution of the world’s energy problems with solar power. After the hangout, Kurzweil got on the phone with me to explore a few issues in more detail.

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Bogus Brain-Training Claims

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 17:39:00 +0000

The New Yorker - 4.5.13 by Gareth Cook

Over the last year, however, the idea that working-memory training has broad benefits has crumbled.

A decade ago, a young Swedish researcher named Torkel Klingberg made a spectacular discovery. He gave a group of children computer games designed to boost their memory, and, after weeks of play, the kids showe

d improvements not only in memory but in overall intellectual ability. Spending hours memorizing strings of digits and patterns of circles on a four-by-four grid had made the children smarter. The finding countered decades of psychological research that suggested training in one area (e.g., recalling numbers) could not bring benefits in other, unrelated areas (e.g., reasoning). The Klingberg experiment also hinted that intelligence, which psychologists considered essentially fixed, might be more mutable: that it was less like eye color and more like a muscle.

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Where Have All the Aliens Gone?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:27:00 +0000

ScienceBlogs - Posted by Ethan on March 29, 2013

“If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens… Where Is Everybody?” -Stephen Webb

It’s one of the biggest conundrums in the Universe, known as the Fermi Paradox: if the Universe is so conducive to life, and if there are so many opportunities for it within our galaxy alone, why isn’t there any evidence (outside of the History Channel) of extraterrestrial life?

Moreover, why haven’t we been visited by some extraterrestrial intelligence? After all, given the fact that our Universe is nearly 14 billion years old, while our galaxy itself is only a hundred-thousand light years from end-to-end, shouldn’t all of the potentially habitable planets have been visited, and colonized, by now?

A couple of years ago, I went through the estimates — both conservatively and liberally — of how rare or common intelligent life in the Universe is. But what I wanted to focus on, today, are the difficulties in even intelligently speaking about this question. First off, let’s start with the good news.

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Getting Closer to Quantum Computers

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 19:58:00 +0000

Wired - 3.29.13 by Klint Finley

Photo: Wylie/Flickr

Quantum computing — widely called the holy grail of tech research — has taken another step towards reality, thanks to a group of researchers at Yale University. The team recently developed a new way to change the quantum state of photons, the elementary particles researchers hope to use for quantum memory.

Today’s computers store information as bits, where each bit holds either a “1″ or a “0.” But a quantum computer is built around quantum bits, or qubits, that can store a 1, a 0 or any combination of both 1 and 0 at the same time. For example, a qubit could be 90 percent “0″ and 10 percent “1.”

So far, all we’ve seen are some proofs of concept that can do simple calculations, but a full-blown quantum computer consisting of many qubits would be able to perform complex calculations far outside the limits of even the most powerful of today’s supercomputers.

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First Ever Actual View of Another Planetary System

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:47:00 +0000

Kurzweil News - 3.14.13

New imaging tools penetrate bright starlight to image planets; could help identify candidate habitable planets for 100YSS expedition.

American Museum of Natural History

Researchers have conducted a remote reconnaissance of a distant solar system with a new telescope imaging system that sifts through the blinding light of stars.

Using a suite of high-tech instrumentation and software called Project 1640, the scientists collected the first chemical fingerprints, or spectra, of this system’s four red exoplanets, which orbit a star 128 light years away from Earth.

A detailed description of the planets — showing how drastically different they are from the known worlds in the universe — was accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Overcoming bright starlight

The planets surrounding the star of this study, HR 8799, have been imaged in the past. But except for a partial measurement of the outermost planet in the system, the star’s bright light overwhelmed previous attempts to study the planets with spectroscopy, a technique that splits the light from an object into its component colors — as a prism spreads sunlight into a rainbow.

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How AI Could Destroy Us

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:06:00 +0000

Aeon (by Ross Andersen)

There are good reasons for any species to think darkly of its own extinction.

Sometimes, when you dig into the Earth, past its surface and into the crustal layers, omens appear. In 1676, Oxford professor Robert Plot was putting the final touches on his masterwork, The Natural History of Oxfordshire, when he received a strange gift from a friend. The gift was a fossil, a chipped-off section of bone dug from a local quarry of limestone. Plot recognised it as a femur at once, but he was puzzled by its extraordinary size. The fossil was only a fragment, the knobby end of the original thigh bone, but it weighed more than 20 lbs (nine kilos). It was so massive that Plot thought it belonged to a giant human, a victim of the Biblical flood. He was wrong, of course, but he had the conceptual contours nailed. The bone did come from a species lost to time; a species vanished by a prehistoric catastrophe. Only it wasn’t a giant. It was a Megalosaurus, a feathered carnivore from the Middle Jurassic.

Plot’s fossil was the first dinosaur bone to appear in the scientific literature, but many have followed it, out of the rocky depths and onto museum pedestals, where today they stand erect, symbols of a radical and haunting notion: a set of wildly different creatures once ruled this Earth, until something mysterious ripped them clean out of existence.

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Connecting Computers to your Brain, Wirelessly

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 17:10:00 +0000

Kurzweil News - 3.3.13

“This new wireless system addresses a major need for the next step in providing a practical brain-computer interface."

David A Borton et al./J. Neural Eng.

A team of neuroengineers at Brown University has developed a fully implantable and rechargeable wireless brain sensor capable of relaying real-time broadband signals from up to 100 neurons in freely moving subjects.

Several copies of the novel low-power device, described in the open-access Journal of Neural Engineering, have been performing well in animal models for more than year, a first in the brain-computer interface field.

Brain-computer interfaces could help people with severe paralysis control devices with their thoughts.

Neuroscientists can use such a device to observe, record, and analyze the signals emitted by scores of neurons in particular parts of the animal model’s brain.

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Kiss Privacy Googbye - Google Glass Makes Privacy a Thing of the Past

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 14:44:00 +0000

techradar - 3.1.13 by Gary Marshall

Hurst's worst-case scenario - everything you ever say or do indexed and searchable, with Google Glass embedded into contact lenses so you've no idea who's using it - might be a long way off, but the fundamental problem he's identified is very real.

From time to time we have a mass privacy panic, usually because politicians propose doing something dumb. "How dare you spy on us very slightly!" we yell. "We demand our privacy!"

And then Google does something much worse and the only thing we seem to care about is whether we'll look stupid or not.

We yell the instant any government proposes monitoring our communications.

Why aren't people yelling about Google Glass?

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You're Only As Old As Scientists Say - 72 is the new 30

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:04:00 +0000

Financial Times - 2.25.13 by Norma Cohen

Human longevity has improved so rapidly over the past century that 72 is the new 30, scientists say.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, said progress in lowering the risk of death at all ages has been so rapid since 1900 that life expectancy has risen faster than it did in the previous 200 millennia since modern man began to evolve from hominid species.

The pace of increase in life expectancy has left industrialised economies unprepared for the cost of providing retirement income to so many for so long.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, looked at Swedish and Japanese men – two countries with the longest life expectancies today. It concluded that their counterparts in 1800 would have had lifespans that were closer to those of the earliest hunter-gatherer humans than they would to adult men in both countries today.

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Your Own Star Trek Replicator

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 18:24:00 +0000

New York Times - 2.20.13 by Steven Kurutz

“The word is out in the design community and creative community,” he said. “The applications are limitless.”

Robert Wright for The New York Times

In his State of the Union address last week, along with the standard calls for education reform and energy independence, President Obama gave a shout-out to a growing technology. In a lab in Youngstown, Ohio, the president said, “Workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost anything.”

When Brook Drumm saw clips from the speech at his home outside Sacramento, Calif., he wanted to reach through his TV and give the president a fist bump. Mr. Drumm, a bald, goateed father of three, designed the Printrbot, a desktop 3-D printer kit. Like a number of other 3-D printers, it uses heated plastic — applied layer by layer to a heated bed by a glue-gun-like extruder — to turn designs created on a computer into real objects.

As Mr. Drumm illustrated in the Kickstarter campaign he used to raise more than $830,000 to start his business in late 2011, the Printrbot is small enough to fit on a kitchen counter, next to the Mr. Coffee. “The goal for the company,” Mr. Drumm said in world-beating tones, “is a printer in every home and every school.”

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Meteors are Not Nuclear Bombs

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 19:27:00 +0000

The Atlantic - 2.22.13 by Rebecca J. Rosen

What does it even mean to say that something is 30 times the size of Hiroshima? Do people have a really strong sense of even what one Hiroshima looks like, and can they then imagine an energy release 30 times that? "Heck, I barely have any point of reference and I'm constantly searching for them!"

Perhaps you saw the reports last week, as the world tried to wrap its collective mind around the piece of outer space that had arrived at our small piece of inner space, that the Russian meteor exploded "with the force of 30 Hiroshima bombs."

And, wow, that sure seems big. And it's true: The Russian meteor was a monster -- the biggest in a century, rocking the city of Chelyabinsk and injuring more than a thousand of its residents.

But even so, even considering the destructive potential of meteors and the punch they can deliver, comparing a meteor's force to a nuclear bomb is a pretty sloppy equation, argues atomic historian Alex Wellerstein, and in its sloppiness, the comparison runs into all sorts of troubles.

"Every time we have a natural disaster, somebody translates the energy output into kilotons and then tells you, using a simple division equation, how many times more that is than Hiroshima," Wellerstein told me. "This is something I find really problematic."

"In general," he added, "What I don't like is ... the idea that kiloton or a megaton is just an energy unit, that it's equivalent to so many joules or something. Because you could do that. You could claim that your house runs so many tons of TNT worth of electricity per year, but it sort of trivializes the notion."

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Would You Take Advantage of Brain Implant Enhancements?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 21:15:00 +0000

IEET - 2.19.13 by Dick Pelletier

More than 80,000 Parkinson's sufferers have found relief using a deep brain stimulator, and brain electronics were implanted into Alzheimer's patients this year in hopes to slow down this insidious killer.

Our brain is the source of everything that makes us human: language, creativity, rationality, emotion, communication, culture, and politics. Now, researchers are set to repair brain functions, to create mind-machine interfaces, and enhance human mental capacities in radical ways.

Today we enjoy basic conversations with our smartphone, desktop PC, games console, TV and, soon, our car; but voice recognition, many believe, should not be viewed as an endgame technology. Although directing electronics with voice and gestures may be considered state-of-the-art today, we will soon be controlling entertainment and communications equipment not by talking or waving; but just by thinking!

Forget Siri, if future-thinking researchers have their way, your brain could soon be chatting away on the phone. A new implant developed by UC-Berkeley neuroscientist, Robert Knight, could create a game-changing relationship between you and your machines. You may soon be able to transmit thoughts via the Internet using a translator chip implanted in the brain that converts thoughts into synthesized words.

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Life Through Google Glass

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 15:40:00 +0000

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So What Comes After the Cloud? Try the Fog

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 18:24:00 +0000

ieee spectrum - 2.8.13 by Tekla Perry

When a Symform customer uploads a file to the fog, Symform’s software replicates it for redundancy, shreds it into tiny pieces, encrypts each piece, and then distributes it to other Symform customers around the continent or multiple continents.

The world has embraced the cloud. What’s not to like? Startups can grow rapidly without investing in racks of computers, companies can back up data easily, consumers can travel light and still have access to their huge photo libraries and other personal files.

Back in October, however, real clouds clashed with metaphorical clouds when Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath took down some key data centers in New York and New Jersey; a serious problem for businesses who had their main servers in New York and their backup servers in nearby New Jersey. Commercial cloud service providers, for the most part, did pretty well; perhaps because some of the largest data centers, like Amazon’s northern Virginia server farm, were not in the disaster zone. But Sandy certainly reminded cloud service providers that redundant files have to be separated by more than a couple of racks, or even a couple of miles.

Continue Reading>>

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Your Next Smartphone May Be Transparent

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 16:20:00 +0000

The Verge - 2.15.13 by Amar Toor

"IT WILL HAPPEN NEAR THE END OF 2013. TRUST ME."

When will we see a transparent smartphone? It's a question that's been circulating for years, thanks to films like Minority Report and Iron Man 2 that sparked dreams of a diaphanous mobile future, and more than a decade later, it's one that's still without an answer. Sony Ericsson's Xperia Pureness fell flat when it hit the market in 2009, and subsequent concept designs never came to fruition, leaving only a trail of dashed hopes and semi-transparent feature phones in their wake.

Now, Taiwan-based Polytron Technologies is trying to revive the dream, with a transparent multi-touch display that it's begun marketing to OEMs. As Mobile Geeks reports, the key to Polytron's prototype is its so-called Switchable Glass technology — a conductive OLED that uses liquid crystal molecules to display images. When the phone is powered off, these molecules form a white cloudy composition, but once activated with electric current (flowing through transparent wires), they realign to form text, icons, or other imagery.

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Another Call to Rethink Email

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 18:32:00 +0000

New York Times - 2.9.13 by Jenna Wortham

I was starting to consider e-mail bankruptcy — ditching my account and signing up for a new one — until I heard about a new option in the e-mail wars, an iOS app called Mailbox, which promises to change how we manage our mail.

Jacqui Oakley

IN the not-so-distant past, the chipper AOL sound of “You’ve got mail!” filled me with giddiness and glee. I would eagerly check my in-box, excited to see what message had arrived.

Those days are long gone. Now, when I examine my various e-mail accounts, my main emotion is dread.

One morning last week, I sat at my desk and stared at my Gmail in-box; 40,000 unread e-mails stared back. (That big number is a function of my life as a writer, and of having five different accounts, work and personal.) Feeling unusually invigorated, I attacked the mountain, trashing subscription newsletters and social networking alerts en masse. I typed brief confirmations for various meetings, sent long-overdue R.S.V.P.’s and replied to a few friends who had sent warm notes of hello. In an hour, I worked my way through roughly 100 e-mails.

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The Real Reason for America's Decline - Too Few Babies

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 13:48:00 +0000

Wall Street Journal - 2.2.13 by Jonathan Last

But decline isn't about whether Democrats or Republicans hold power; it isn't about political ideology at all. At its most basic, it's about the sustainability of human capital. Whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney took the oath of office last month, we would still be declining in the most important sense—demographically. It is what drives everything else.

For more than three decades, Chinese women have been subjected to their country's brutal one-child policy. Those who try to have more children have been subjected to fines and forced abortions. Their houses have been razed and their husbands fired from their jobs. As a result, Chinese women have a fertility rate of 1.54. Here in America, white, college-educated women—a good proxy for the middle class—have a fertility rate of 1.6. America has its very own one-child policy. And we have chosen it for ourselves.

Forget the debt ceiling. Forget the fiscal cliff, the sequestration cliff and the entitlement cliff. Those are all just symptoms. What America really faces is a demographic cliff: The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate.

The fertility rate is the number of children an average woman bears over the course of her life. The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children than that, population grows. Fewer, and it contracts. Today, America's total fertility rate is 1.93, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; it hasn't been above the replacement rate in a sustained way since the early 1970s.

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Steering Spacecraft Via Mind-Meld (2 Brains Better Than 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 19:20:00 +0000

New Scientist - 2.1.13 by Paul Marks

TURNS out two heads really are better than one. Two people have successfully steered a virtual spacecraft by combining the power of their thoughts - and their efforts were far more accurate than one person acting alone. One day groups of people hooked up to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) might work together to control complex robotic and telepresence systems, maybe even in space.

A BCI system records the brain's electrical activity using EEG signals, which are detected with electrodes attached to the scalp. Machine-learning software learns to recognise the patterns generated by each user as they think of a certain concept, such as "left" or "right". BCIs have helped people with disabilities to steer a wheelchair, for example.

Researchers are discovering, however, that they get better results in some tasks by combining the signals from multiple BCI users. Until now, this "collaborative BCI" technique has been used in simple pattern-recognition tasks, but a team at the University of Essex in the UK wanted to test it more rigorously.

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