QUEST Discussion Topics
29 June 2012
We will start this week with a discussion of the
DARPA Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts (NIA) effort.
These experiments demonstrated use of brain signals to help
analysts increase search throughput, and support rapid target
detection in overhead imagery. Using the brain-enabled triage search
method, researchers were able to show at least a 600% increase in
search throughput (measured in square kilometers per min) across
multiple image analysts and target types. Our discussion will focus
on the QUEST sys1 / sys2 formalism with respect to this effort and
the juxtaposition of the human as a screening tool versus some
computer algorithm for large data sets.
The second topic is associated with our recent discussions on an
experimental approach to tease out the key aspects of consciousness
that contribute to functional robustness in tasks like analysts face.
We will have a discussion on ‘Types of Qualia’ with the goal being to
begin to articulate what are the types of information necessary in the
sys2 representation, (I was uncomfortable when the key
characteristics was spatial resolution). This discussion will mature
our views of what information will be passed between the humans in
the proposed experiment.
Also, a tip from Maj Dube.
“Elsevier has a new journal titled Biologically Inspired Cognitive
Architectures that on the surface (title, aims, scope) appears very much
related to QUEST.
Here's a link:
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/biologically-inspired-cognitive-architectur
es/?utm_source=ESJ001&utm_campaign=&utm_content=&utm_medium=
email&bid=7YP376
F:UPC9V4F
News Stories
1. Microsoft goes social
http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/25/technology/microsoft-yammer/
Is corporate America ready to adopt social networking
alongside traditional office tools like word
processing apps and spreadsheets?... Microsoft is
making a big bet in that direction. It has acquired Yammer, an
"enterprise social networking" startup…Yammer operates
like a gated Facebook (FB): A business can set up a
private network where employees can post
announcements, share files, create events, swap
messages and more…also offers more traditional
corporate features like a content management system and an
"extranet" that businesses can use to communicate with outside
contacts like customers and vendors…companies' joint
statement said Yammer "will continue to develop its
standalone service," and that it will also be paired
with "complementary offerings from Microsoft
SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and
Skype."… So-called "enterprise social" startups
have been hot in the M&A space lately…In late May,
Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500) acquired Buddy Media
competitor Vitrue for a reported $300 million…
2. Google Deep learning
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-ofcomputers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html?_r=1&ref=technology
Inside Google’s secretive X
laboratory, known for inventing
self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses,
a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a
simulation of the human brain…Google scientists created
one of the largest
neural networks for machine
learning by connecting 16,000 computer
processors, which they turned loose on the
Internet to learn on its own…Presented with 10
million digital images found in YouTube
videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with
YouTube: looked for cats…neural network taught itself to
recognize cats, which is actually no frivolous
activity…It performed far better than any
previous effort by roughly doubling its
accuracy in recognizing objects in a
challenging list of 20,000 distinct items…research
is representative of a new generation of computer science that is exploiting
the falling cost of computing and the availability of huge clusters of
computers in giant data centers. It is leading to significant advances in
areas as diverse as machine vision and perception, speech recognition and
language translation…some of the computer science ideas that the
researchers are using are not new, the sheer scale of the software
simulations is leading to learning systems that were not previously
possible. And Google researchers are not alone in exploiting the
techniques, which are referred to as “deep learning”
models…used an array of 16,000 processors to create a neural
network with more than one billion connections. They then fed it random
thumbnails of images, one each extracted from 10 million YouTube
videos…software-based neural network created by the researchers
appeared to closely mirror theories developed by biologists that suggest
individual neurons are trained inside the brain to detect significant
objects….Currently much commercial machine vision
technology is done by having humans
“supervise” the learning process by labeling
specific features. In the Google research, the
machine was given no help in identifying
features…Google brain assembled a dreamlike digital image of a cat
by employing a hierarchy of memory locations to successively cull out
general features after being exposed to millions of images….Despite being
dwarfed by the immense scale of biological brains, the
Google research provides new evidence that
existing machine learning algorithms improve
greatly as the machines are given access to
large pools of data….“The scale of modeling the full
human visual cortex may be within reach before the end
of the decade.”…
3. Hacking Hawking
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/stephenhawking/9352358/Scientists-developing-device-to-hack-into-brain-ofStephen-Hawking.html
Stephen Hawking is testing out a
groundbreaking device to allow him to
communicate through brain waves in a
project that scientists have likened to
'hacking into his brain.'…Hawking, 70, has been
working with scientists at Standford University who are developing a
the iBrain - a tool which picks up brain waves and
communicates them via a computer….Hawking and Low
described how the physicist had learnt to create patterns of
impulses by imagining moving his hands and limbs….is hoped
that as the technology becomes more advanced it could recognise
more sophisticated brain activity and turn it into words…"The
emergence of such biomarkers opens the possibility to link intended
movements to a library of words and convert them into speech, thus
providing motor neurone sufferers with communication tools more
dependent on the brain than on the body."… Beyond mind reading,
the device has potential medical applications, such as enlisting the
iBrain to help doctors prescribe the correct levels of medication
based on a person's brainwave responses…