DARPA is developing brain-control capability (8)

http://hrnel.pitt.edu/images/DARPA_brochure.pdf

DARPA is developing brain-control capability (7)

DARPA is developing brain-control capability (6)

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/smart-takes/darpa-aims-to-control-prosthetic-limbs-with-brain-implants/4890

DARPA aims to control prosthetic limbs with brain implants

By Andrew Nusca | March 10, 2010, 6:28 AM PST

As the use of prosthetic limbs increases in military veterans, the Pentagon is investigating prostheses that are more durable, reliable and directly controlled using brain implants.

DARPA, the military’s research arm, said it will launch the next phase of its decade-old Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, which had an original goal to create a fully-functioning, neurally-controlled human limb within five years.

Though the agency has made considerable progress —human trials of the DEKA Arm are underway, and a neurally-controlled arm is under development at Johns Hopkins University — it hasn’t yet achieved its goal.

The hurdles:

It has proved difficult to fully integrate human neural pathways with artificial platforms.

Neural-recording interfaces have short life spans of just two years.

Neural-recording interfaces don’t extract adequate information to yield seamless movement from brain to neurons to limbs.

Current prototypes can’t move fast enough: even at 500 events per second, it’s not enough for fluid motion.

To face the challenge, DARPA is launching its Histology for Interface Stability Over Time program.

The goal: create a neurally-controlled limb that lasts for 70 years and has complete integration with the human body.

Here’s what the agency says (.pdf):

DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the area of neural-recording interface failure analysis. The HIST program seeks to develop the technology needed to reliably extract information from the nervous system, and to do so at a scale and rate necessary to control many degree-of-freedom (DOF) machines, such as high-performance prosthetic limbs. Technologies and techniques emerging from this program will enable the construction of reliable neural-recording interfaces, which will be suitable for clinical use over the lifetime of an injured soldier (~70 years). Additionally, an objective understanding of the failure mechanisms will lead to high-throughput biological testing, due to the discovery of predictive markers linked to a high probability of failure and other accelerated-testing techniques. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.

In other words: DARPA wants to understand why neural-recording interfaces are so unreliable, and how failure can be predicted before an amputee is left without the use of an artificial limb.

The program is structures in three phases over three years. It’s basically like a hacker contest for prosthetic limbs — DARPA wants researchers to overload neural systems to find vulnerabilities.

Of particular concern are “implanted cortical microelectrodes,” or brain implants, which DARPA believes may be the best system for the job.

DARPA is developing brain-control capability (5)

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-09/darpa-wants-mind-control-keep-soldiers-sharp-smart-and-safe

DARPA has been trying to crawl inside the minds of soldiers for a while now, but a new ultrasound technology could let them get deeper inside than ever. Working under a DARPA grant, a researcher at Arizona State is developing transcranial pulsed ultrasound technology that could be implanted in troops’ battle helmets, allowing soldiers to manipulate brain functions to boost alertness, relieve stress, or even reduce the effects of traumatic brain injury.

Manipulating the brain to enhance warfighting capabilities and maintain mental acuity on the battlefield has long been a topic of interest for DARPA and various military research labs, but the technology to do so remains limited. Deep brain stimulation (DBS), for instance, requires surgically implanted electrodes to stimulate neural tissues, while less-invasive methods like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) possess limited reach and low spatial resolution.

But Dr. William J. Tyler, an assistant professor of life sciences at ASU, writes on the DoD’s “Armed With Science” blog: “To overcome the above limitations, my laboratory has engineered a novel technology which implements transcranial pulsed ultrasound to remotely and directly stimulate brain circuits without requiring surgery. Further, we have shown this ultrasonic neuromodulation approach confers a spatial resolution approximately five times greater than TMS and can exert its effects upon subcortical brain circuits deep within the brain.”

Tyler’s technology, packaged in a warfighter’s helmet, would allow soldiers to flip a switch to stimulate different regions of their brains, helping them relieve battle stress when it’s time to get some rest, or to boost alertness during long periods without sleep. Grunts could even relieve pain from injuries or wounds without resorting to pharmaceutical drugs. More importantly, in the periods after brain trauma ultrasound technology could reduce swelling and metabolic damage that is often the root cause of lasting brain damage.

DARPA is developing brain-control capability (4)

IBM produces first 'brain chips'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14574747

IBM has developed a microprocessor which it claims comes closer than ever to replicating the human brain.

The system is capable of "rewiring" its connections as it encounters new information, similar to the way biological synapses work.

Researchers believe that by replicating that feature, the technology could start to learn.

Cognitive computers may eventually be used for understanding human behaviour as well as environmental monitoring.

Dharmendra Modha, IBM's project leader, explained that they were trying to recreate aspects of the mind such as emotion, perception, sensation and cognition by "reverse engineering the brain."

The SyNAPSE system uses two prototype "neurosynaptic computing chips". Both have 256 computational cores, which the scientists described as the electronic equivalent of neurons.

One chip has 262,144 programmable synapses, while the other contains 65,536 learning synapses.

Man machine

In humans and animals, synaptic connections between brain cells physically connect themselves depending on our experience of the world. The process of learning is essentially the forming and strengthening of connections.

A machine cannot solder and de-solder its electrical tracks. However, it can simulate such a system by "turning up the volume" on important input signals, and paying less attention to others.

IBM has not released exact details of how its SyNAPSE processor works, but Dr Richard Cooper, a reader in cognitive science at Birkbeck, University of London said that it likely replicated physical connections using a "virtual machine".

Instead of stronger and weaker links, such a system would simply remember how much "attention" to pay to each signal and alter that depending on new experiences.

"Part of the trick is the learning algorithm - how should you turn those volumes up and down," said Dr Cooper.

"There's a a whole bunch of tasks that can be done just with a relatively simple system like that such as associative memory. When we see a cat we might think of a mouse."

Some future-gazers in the cognitive computing world have speculated that the technology will reach a tipping point where machine consciousness is possible.

However, Dr Mark Bishop, professor of cognitive computing at Goldsmiths, was more cautious.

"[I] understand cognition to be something over and above a process simulated by the execution of mere computations, [and] see such claims as verging on the magical," he said.

IBM's work on the SyNAPSE project continues and the company, along with its academic partners, has just been awarded $21m (£12.7m) by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

DARPA is developing brain-control capability (3)

DARPA takes new look at electrical brain stimulation to aid in learning April 21, 2011

by Bob Yirka in Neuroscience

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-04-darpa-electrical-brain-aid.html

New research going on in Albequerque, NM by a team of neuroscientists working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) indicates that mild brain stimulation with electrical shocks, might in fact cause people to learn more easily.

The team, led by Vincent Clark, of the University of New Mexico, has been applying electrodes to the scalps of volunteers, and then giving them very mild electrical shocks while they play a battle simulation video game designed to teach soldiers to react properly in stressful conditions. Called transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), the procedure employs a nine volt battery and electrodes connected to wet sponges affixed to the temples of game players to send just a few milliamps of current through the skull and into the brain as they attempt to differentiate between friend and foe in dilapidated, potentially dangerous environmental conditions.

Two groups were tested, one received 2 milliamps while they played, the other just 0.1. The volunteers receiving the larger amount showed twice as much improvement as those that did not, which Clark says shows quite clearly how effective tDCS can be. Pilot video for tDCS informed consent. Applying electricity to the brain has a long and at times dark history.

Doctors, psychiatrists and other researchers have known for hundreds of years that applying electrical current to the brain can cause changes; some good, some not so much. Electrical stimulation has been used to keep executed prisoners from twitching after death, to “help” patients overcome depression and more recently to help people with injuries or brain impairments to regain functionality. This history now colors any new research as fear and skepticism tend to get in the way of serious work.

This is likely the reason that this new research is being done by DARPA, rather than an independent organization; it doesn’t have to answer to anyone except the DoD. Because the amount of current is so small, volunteers report no pain, just a slight tingling sensation during the procedure, and afterwards can offer no real explanations as to why they performed better than they might have otherwise.

This research, and other studies like it, have set off both alarms and intrigue in certain quarters. Some worry people, such as college students will jump on the procedure as a means to help cram for exams, others wonder if electronic devices such as blue-tooth phones are emitting electricity that might help them learn; while others yet point out, very soberly, that no one really knows just yet what long-term effects people might have from exposure to something as simple as tCDS.

Read more at: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-04-darpa-electrical-brain-aid.html#jCp

DARPA is developing brain-control capability (2)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/18/ibm_darpa_synapse_project/

DARPA shells out $21m for IBM cat brain chip

By Timothy Prickett Morgan 

Posted in Rise of the Machines, 18th August 2011 16:27 GMT

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is moving ahead with IBM in the third leg of its Synapse cat brain chip. That leaves one more leg, a tail, and nine lives to go.

Because this is the military, the third leg of the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (Synapse) project at DARPA is called phase 2, and IBM's techies have already completed phases 0 and 1. The initial phase of the project simulated the cortex of a cat brain on an IBM BlueGene massively parallel supercomputer with 147,456 cores and 144TB of memory and developing the basic synaptic circuits for the brain chip.

[…]

Phase one, which brought in $16.1m in funding spread across IBM and researchers at Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center, and the University of California-Merced, focused on simulating and building prototype brain chips that have electronic synapses and memory circuits instead of simulating them using sequentially processing von Neumann-style processors like the ones on our desktops and in the data centers of the world.

IBM is unveiling the fruits of the phase 1 work today and the fact that its cognitive computer dream team, headed up by Dharmendra Modha, the Synapse project leader at IBM Research, as well as announcing that DARPA has allocated another $21m in funding to begin the phase 2 work.

Like most DARPA projects, Synapse has some impressive goals and ones that may not pan out. There is a lot of talk about "dawn of a new paradigm" and "dawn of a new age" as researchers try to create brain-like systems. The problem, according to DARPA, is that von Neumann machines, while great for playing Angry Birds and wasting time at work, are less efficient than biological computers – the ripply, fat-encrusted gray stuff between your ears – by between a factor of 1 million to 1 billion. It takes an increasingly complex von Neumann machine to handle increasingly complex data streaming in from the environment:

[…]

The IBM team is working for DARPA to create a chip that is designed to chew on streams telemetry and rewire itself, much as your brain does as it learns, as it learns about the world from that telemetry.

"This is a major initiative to move beyond the von Neumann paradigm that has been ruling computer architecture for more than half a century," said Modha in a statement. "Future applications of computing will increasingly demand functionality that is not efficiently delivered by the traditional architecture. These chips are another significant step in the evolution of computers from calculators to learning systems, signaling the beginning of a new generation of computers and their applications in business, science and government."

[…]

IBM is not using wetware biological components to make its neurosynaptic chips, but rather plain old 45 nanometer CMOS with silicon-on-oxide doping, exactly the same process that IBM is using to etch its Power7 processors. The neurosynaptic cores replicating the function of synapses, neurons, and axons in the brain to provide memory, computation, and communication. IBM has created two prototype neurosynaptic chips thus far, which have 256 simulated neurons. One design has 262,144 programmable synapses and the other has 65,536 learning synapses.

IBM has already put these relatively small-brained chips through the paces performing navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, associative memory, and other tasks. The long-term goal of the Synapse project is to create a system based on the neurosynaptic chips that has 10 billion electronic neurons and 100 trillion synapses, all packed up in a two-liter volume and burning only one kilowatt.

[…]

At this point, we humans can tell the Internet to go read and write itself and get back to goofing off. Or, we'll be working the gas chambers for Skynet.

In phase 3 of the Synapse project, IBM plans to cook up a chip with 10 million neurons and work on simulation and design of a fake brain with 100 million neurons using a multi-chip. In phase 4 of the project, IBM Research's team hopes to build a robot using this multi-chip fake brain and do the emulation and simulation of a fake brain with around 10 billion neurons, what IBM and DARPA call a "human level design". ®