Archive (Page 2 of 3)

Machines That Can Read Human Emotions

The face is a con­stant flow of facial expres­sions. We react and emote to exter­nal stim­uli all the time. And it is exact­ly this flow of expres­sions that is the observ­able win­dow to our inner self. Our emo­tions, our inten­tions, atti­tudes, moods. Why is this impor­tant? Because we can use it in a very wide vari­ety of applications.

The Rise of Social Robotics

Social ref­er­enc­ing is so great robots should do it, too. But first there are some tech­ni­cal chal­lenges that we need to solve. For instance, low ener­gy con­sump­tion. Throughout these tech­ni­cal chal­lenges, what these robots real­ly need to do is under­stand the social envi­ron­ment that they are in. 

Realizing a Brain on a Chip

If we want to con­tin­ue increas­ing the per­for­mance of our com­put­ers, we need to rethink the way we com­pute. And our brains are won­der­ful proof that impres­sive com­pu­ta­tions can be car­ried out with a very low pow­er budget.

The Factory of the Future Fits in Your Home

As we began this work in 1987, 1990, going through that peri­od, 3D print­ers were pret­ty clum­sy. But now they’re cheap­er, they’re much more pre­cise and much more accu­rate. So, [now] we can actu­al­ly print the chem­i­cals for a battery.

Traditional Medicine Reimagined Through Modern Systems Biology

Why are nat­ur­al com­pounds bet­ter than syn­thet­ic chem­i­cals to treat dis­eases? We have inten­sive­ly ana­lyzed all those known com­pounds in the nat­ur­al prod­ucts, and found that these com­pounds have high­er sim­i­lar­i­ty, espe­cial­ly struc­tur­al sim­i­lar­i­ty, to human metabolites.

Applying Neuroscientific Findings to Enduring Social Problems

When low­er pri­mates form a hier­ar­chy, those at the bot­tom under­go a change in their dopamine sys­tem. This makes them more like­ly to con­sume drugs in an addic­tive fash­ion. Now, if this turns out to be true of our species, that would mean that human beings are par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble if they’re in some way dom­i­nat­ed or don’t have any power.

From Biomolecular Computing to Internet Democracy

My main point is that Internet tech­nol­o­gy today does not sup­port the right of assem­bly, and there­fore it can­not and does not sup­port democ­ra­cy. The rea­son is that even though we can eas­i­ly form groups on Google, Facebook, you name it, we don’t know who the peo­ple on the group are.

Reimagining Everyday Devices as Information-Delivery Systems

What we’re try­ing to think about now is, take the sort of ven­er­a­ble light bulb and recast it as a com­pu­ta­tion­al appli­ance. So, how do we take some­thing that’s been so remark­ably suc­cess­ful and infuse it with com­pu­ta­tion­al abilities?

Looking to Ants to Better Understand Collective Behaviour

How can we extend what we are learn­ing about how sim­ple local inter­ac­tions in ant colonies or in brains, in the aggre­gate, pro­duce the col­lec­tive behav­ior of the group and the way that it responds to chang­ing con­di­tions? How can we extend what we’re learn­ing about col­lec­tive behav­ior in oth­er sys­tems to begin think­ing about col­lec­tive behav­ior in human social organizations?

Engineering Thoughts and Memories

In brain decod­ing, we take our mod­el that we’ve devel­oped of the brain (and this can be a mod­el for any­thing, vision or lan­guage) and we reverse it. And instead of going from the stim­u­lus to the brain activ­i­ty, we go from the brain activ­i­ty back to the stimulus.