According to IBM, 'BlueMatter, a new algorithm created by IBM researchers in collaboration with Stanford University, exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture in order to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging. Mapping the wiring diagram of the brain is crucial to untangling its vast communication network and understanding how it represents and processes information.'
(Credit: IBM)Computers capable of mimicking the human brain's power and efficiency could be just 10 years off, according to a leading researcher at IBM.
According to the researcher, Dharmendra Modha, the manager of IBM's cognitive computing initiative, scientists from his company and some of the world's most prestigious universities have already managed to simulate the computing complexity of the feline cortex, a feat that could augur a day not too far off when it will be possible to ramp up to what the human brain can accomplish.
Last year, IBM and five universities were awarded a DARPA contract to work on a cognitive computing project aimed at eventually achieving that goal. Just a year later, Modha said, his team, working in conjunction with the universities' scientists, have achieved two major milestones.
The first was a real-time cortical simulation that achieved more than 1 billion spiking neurons, as well as 10 trillion individual learning synapses. According to Modha, that exceeds what a cat's cortex is capable of.
Second, the scientists created a fresh algorithm they're calling BlueMatter that is aimed at spelling out the connections between all the human brain's cortical and sub-cortical locations. That mapping is a critical step, Modha suggested, for a true understanding of how the brain communicates and processes information.
The human brain, Modha said, is fundamentally different from today's computers in power and size, and he and the many scientists he is working with are eager to learn from the brain how to build new kinds of computing architectures. Part of the reason, he added, is that as our world gets more and more complex, a "tsunami" of data is being produced and analyzing those data demands "a new kind of cognitive system, a brain-like system, to make sense of it."
To achieve the goal, Modha and his fellow scientists are combining supercomputing, neuroscience, and nanotechnology research to demonstrate what's possible. The work they've done has progressed in just a year from the granting of the DARPA contract to today's achievements.
Modha said that examples of what could be done with computers working at this scale are realistic analysis of the world's water supply systems, or financial systems. The idea is to detect causality behind phenomena, and to make those connections quickly and effortlessly, the way the human brain works. Writing such a program using today's computers would be impossible, he said, but these future computers would be able to quickly distill answers to these kinds of enormous problems.
There's no promise, of course, that Modha and his colleagues will be able to advance the difference between the power of the cat and human cortexes in the next decade. After all, there's a difference of a factor of 20 between the two. But he sounded optimistic that a decade is a realistic goal.
But regardless of the timing, the aim is clear: reverse-engineer the human brain and learn its computational algorithms. And then deploy them in a bid to solve some of the world's most complicated computing problems.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--While I'm sure that many of the people in the room were familiar with prediction markets, I wonder how many of them had ever seen an active one up close and personal before.
Providing that sense of deep immersion, of course, was exactly the point of an exercise run Monday during a session of Singularity University's executive program by Melanie Swan, a Silicon Valley hedge fund manager. Swan, the principal of MS Futures Group, had tasked small groups of students with coming up with world-changing product ideas and then simultaneously had the students vote in an online prediction market looking at which product and team would be rewarded with the most faux-venture capital.
Despite the fact that some technical problems got in the way, the point was made: prediction markets, given enough active participation, are increasingly seen as an excellent way to arrive at the answers to any number of questions, whether it's sales figures, who will win presidential elections, or who will get the most VC funding. Indeed, the winning technology concept--a pill that could cure cancer--and team were accurately prognosticated by the market.
For the group of superstar achievers like the students in the executive program, this was but one piece of a meticulously constructed nine-day education that many hope will supplement and enhance already successful careers in a wide range of disciplines.
Other sessions included looks at the state-of-the-art in medical research from Daniel Kraft, an instructor in Stanford's cancer/stem cell biology institute, and Chris deCharms, the founder of Omneuron, a company working on new MRI technologies; future forecasting from Peter Bishop, the coordinator of the futures studies program at the University of Houston; a workshop in the future of medicine and biomedical technology from Stanford developmental biotechnology professor, Stuart Kim; and a talk by Harvard Law School professor and Internet law expert Johnathan Zittrain.
And that was all just on Monday.
Four start-ups emerged
Earlier this year, Singularity University (SU) ran its inaugural summer session, a nine-week program based at NASA's Ames Research Center here in the heart of Silicon Valley, aimed at giving the best 40 of more than 1,200 applicants a highly concentrated education in a series of exponentially growing technologies like biotechnology and bioinformatics; nanotechnology; AI, robotics, and cognitive computing.
For those students, who were chosen based on having demonstrated top-level academic rigor, entrepreneurial and leadership skills, an interest in global issues and who were seen as already being at the top of their chosen fields, the nine weeks were a marathon of long days and nights of lectures from world-leading thinkers, workshops in the technologies that could shape the future and group projects centered on coming up with ways to positively impact a billion people. Already, four start-ups have emerged from the summer session.
But now the first of SU's nine-day executive program is in full swing, and according to co-founder, X Prize Chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, the goal now is to distill the best parts of the nine-week SU version and present them to the new students in a way that will be of the most use to them.
"The executive program is really focused on providing the information in a much more organized and digestible fashion for executives, addressing the issue of what's in the lab today and where is this going in five years," said Diamandis (see video below). "What is the key terminology that (the students) should know about these fields, what are the top ten breakthrough milestones that you should be watching out for, and, ultimately, how are these breakthroughs going to affect you, your company and your industry."
That's obviously a very ambitious mission statement, but for many of the 20 people lucky enough to be taking part in the executive program, Diamandis and his fellow organizers have succeeded in pulling together something very worthwhile, even as it is one of the most intense experiences of their lives.
"It's like taking medical school and boiling down four years into about four days," said Michael Gillam, a physician who runs the health care innovation lab at Microsoft. "That will give you a sense of the sort of depth of the material" covered during the executive session.
From the beginning, SU's founders--futurist and "The Singuality is Near" author Ray Kurzweil; Diamandis; and ex-Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail--had planned on the institution offering both the longer summer sessions and shorter, three- and nine-day executive programs. In the process of actually putting them together, though, Ismail said, the three-day version got scrapped for simply being too short.
Instead, the executive program's first group of students--20 people of varying ages and professions, half of whom are American and half international--arrived at Ames on Friday having paid the $15,000 fee, each in search of something a little bit different.
Sole focus is on tomorrow
For Gillam, the rationale for taking nine days off from work--he said he'd come on vacation from Microsoft since it would have been impossible to take part in the summer session--was crystal clear: to get a deep dive in the technologies that are coming screaming down the line at us.
"You can go almost anywhere today and hear about historical trends (or a) deep analysis of today," Gillam said. "But there's virtually no place where the sole focus is on tomorrow, and where we are going. That was extremely intriguing and what captured my attention."
For Peter Platzer, a currencies and commodities trader from New York, attending SU was all about having meaningful interactions with the diverse and accomplished group of faculty and staff and to get a better understanding of the kinds of exponential technologies that are being discussed there.
And according to organizers, some of the students, whose numbers include venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and government representatives, even came solely for the chance to meet, and potentially invest with, members of the start-ups that came out of the summer session.
Alumni network
Those potential relationships are possible because one of the things that's already developing at SU is a strong alumni network. That's evident at the executive program in the group of summer session graduates who have returned as faculty assistants--who also happen to be able to sit in on all the deliberations and discussions--and in the number of faculty who themselves have come back for more.
Diamandis said that there's no doubt that SU is fostering an ongoing network that is sure to benefit all who join. For example, he suggested that if, in the future, a graduate wanted to find someone who was a European robotics expert, they would likely be able to find such a person in the SU program. Because the executive program will be repeated in February and again in April, and the nine-week program next summer, there will only be more members of the network as time passes.
And as proof that SU graduates take their membership in that network seriously, Ismail pointed out that though it's only been two months since the summer students graduated, they'd already had a reunion.
To faculty member Dan Barry, a former NASA astronaut--and cast member of CNET News parent company CBS' "Survivor"--the main difference between the summer session students and those in the executive program is that while the former tended to be very smart people at crossroads in their lives and careers, the latter are very established in their respective businesses and are seeing how they can become aware of, and perhaps utilize, the future technologies being discussed.
Still, Barry said he sees more similarities than differences between the two groups. Both, he said, are "interested in technology and the future and are concerned about the state of the planet and the people on it."
For Barry, taking part as part of the faculty has been a refreshing change of course that, thanks to the "potential and excitement (I see) reflected in their eyes," has re-energized him professionally.
"When I talk with other astronauts...about space, we tend to talk about technical things," Barry said. "When I talk (to the students) it helps me to remember...what's spectacular about going to space."
Several masks that have been evaluated for safety against various chemical 'agents' sit on a table at the Dugway Proving Ground. CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman visited the facility as part of his Road Trip 2009 project.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)DUGWAY, Utah--In a world where American soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq might find themselves under attack from chemical or biological weapons, who's looking out for their safety?
The answer lies deep in the western Utah desert, at a U.S. Army facility called the Dugway Proving Ground where, among other things, groups of scientists are researching how to defend against a wide variety of potentially lethal, or at least dangerous, "agents."
"Dugway's primary mission is testing United States and Allied chemical and biological (CB) defense systems and also performing nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) contamination survivability testing of defense materiel," a fact sheet about Dugway reads. "With more than 50 years of experience, (Dugway) uses its state-of-the-art laboratories and chambers in concert with extensive field test grids to fully determine the performance characteristics of items being tested."
I visited Dugway this week as part of Road Trip 2009, and was given a tour and an explanation of both the facility's Chemical Test and Life Sciences divisions.
Notwithstanding the official explanation from the fact sheet, as Raven Reitstetter, the acting division chief of the Chemical Test Division put it to me, Dugway's primary mission is to test protective equipment against chemical and biological agents. Everyone I talked to made the point that while some such agents are stored at Dugway--generally for no longer than 90 days--the purpose of the facility is strictly defensive. In fact, Dugway is not even authorized to produce chemicals.
And while there are certainly dangerous chemicals on hand at any given time, a series of safety systems, including multiple air filters, are designed, I was told, to make the air that leaves the Chemical Test Division cleaner than the air that goes in.
Of course, given the reality that there are actual dangerous chemicals being used in the facility, the division runs monthly safety and response drills so that if there ever is an accident, everyone involved is supposed to know what to do.
Two different kinds of labs
Within the Chemical division, there are two different kinds of labs. The first is for engineering systems to evaluate protective equipment, such as respirators and uniforms. The second is for analyzing the properties of various chemicals.
I was taken into one of the protective equipment labs and shown a system in which mannequins wearing special masks are hooked up to artificial lungs and subjected to various kinds of chemical agents. The question that is trying to be answered is when does the agent break through the protection. And the idea is to test the kinds of soldiers' outfits that are as close as possible to what they would have in an actual operational environment so that any analysis has real-world significance.
"We're in constant development for improving (the equipment) and making it closer to the physiological conditions of humans wearing this type of equipment," Reitstetter said.
Similarly, another of this type of lab is set up to examine how various kinds of protective clothing hold up to different chemicals. The scientists will take small swatches of clothing material, contaminate them inside a special "cup" and see whether the chemical breaks through. And as before, the conditions are meant to be as real-world as possible, so the scientists play around with different temperatures and relative humidity combinations to see how they affect the efficacy of the swatches.
The second type of lab is for analyzing chemicals. Using gas chromatographs (GC) that can detect the presence of even single digit parts per billion of chemical agents, the GC machines are designed to, among other things, separate simulants that mimic chemical agents based on their physical and chemical properties. The idea here is to learn the signatures of individual chemicals so that those in the field can learn to look for and detect them, and know how to neutralize them.
Ultimately, the point of the labs is to be able to give soldiers an affirmative answer to their most basic query about potential chemical attacks: will they be protected?
Biotechnology
After finishing up at the Chemical Test Division, I was taken to another part of the huge Dugway grounds. Here, I met Angelo Madonna, Dugway's Biotechnology branch chief.
Madonna and Lynnette Davila, a biosurety assistant, showed me around Dugway's Life Sciences Division, where scientists do similar work as the folks in the Chemical Test Division, except on biological agents.
The logo of the Critical Reagents Program, under which the Army is attempting to create standards for testing various biological materials.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)Within the Life Sciences Division, there are four branches: Aerosol technology, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) training, compliance and methodology and biological testing and antigen production, and each has a specific purpose.
The Aerosol technology branch is responsible for all field work and field tests. The WMD training branch is designed to give first responders, like firefighters, paramedics, police and others, training on the basics of dealing with "bugs," or biological agents. The compliance and methodology branch is meant to ensure that Dugway is following the kinds of new regulations for dealing with dangerous agents that have been in place since 2005. And, lastly, the biological testing and antigen production branch is responsible for the lab testing of such agents.
Again, the point was made to me that the purpose of the facility was strictly defensive. While the Life Sciences Division goes grow some kinds of agents for testing purposes, they're defensive, I was assured.
And as with the Chemical Test Division, Madonna and his colleagues are responsible for testing protective equipment and detectors and for decontamination when there's exposure to dangerous agents.
Davila explained that the facility was set up to deal with three levels of biological agents. Biological Safety Level 1 (BSL1) equates to the kinds of normal situations one might find anywhere. BSL2 is more serious, and agents in this category might make someone sick, but there's nearly 100 percent likelihood of their recovery, if treated. But BSL3 agents are the really scary ones, the ones that can easily kill someone or make them very sick. Still, most BSL3 agents are treatable.
However, BSL4 agents are pretty much deadly to anyone exposed to them, and as a result, even the facilities at Dugway are not generally authorized to work with them. If such an agent was discovered somewhere in the West, it might be brought to Dugway, but in general, the government would want any such agent to be taken to specific facilities geared for them.
Well within the building was what is known as the bioholding room. Here, the Life Sciences Division keeps its "reference stock," everything that comes out of the lab. But as a safety measure, everything that goes in the bioholding room is tracked "cradle to grave," Madonna explained. The lab keeps codes for everything and that code follows each sample or specimen everywhere it goes.
The idea is so that anyone who needs to can account for every bit of every biological agent that comes into or is made in the building.
One of the important tasks of the Life Sciences Division is to generate non-pathogenic simulants that various military or civilian field directors need for their testing projects. Madonna said the lab produces what they need, "to their specs."
Ultimately, Madonna and his colleagues are responsible for passing the data onto what is known as the Army Evaluation Center, where they are then passed onto decision makers higher up the chain of command who determine policy based on the information they're given.
Practicing for when terrorists strike
Before I left Dugway, I was taken even further out into the vast desert to Mustang Village, a tiny mock town set up for military and civilian outfits to practice their response to terrorist attacks.
In the village are several buildings including a small hotel, an even smaller post office, and a store, all of which can be used to practice one eventuality or another. In the hotel, for example, scenario training is given on recognizing bomb or chemical or biological agent production labs and distinguishing between them and, say, a meth lab, which, while illegal, isn't all that dangerous.
Departing Dugway, I was left evermore with the impression that a lot of bad things can happen in the world these days, and that a lot of people feel deeply committed to the task of stopping those things from happening, or at least getting ready for them in case of disaster.
Yet, we know that disaster does, indeed, become reality. September 11, Hurricane Katrina, fires in Southern California and, of course, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have put tremendous numbers of Americans in harm's way, not to mention those from other countries.
The Army, then, wants its own people, and the public at large, to feel some comfort in the idea that it has put a group of seasoned professionals in charge of coming up with the data that the country's policymakers can use to guard our soldiers in the field and our civilians at home and abroad against the effects of non-conventional attacks.
For the next several weeks, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be writing about and photographing the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota and Colorado. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
Co-founded by noted futurist Ray Kurzweil and X Prize CEO and chairman Peter Diamandis, Singularity University will begin offering a 10-week interdisciplinary course in exponentially growing technologies this summer.
(Credit: Singularity University)Starting this summer, some of the world's leading thinkers in exponentially growing technologies will be gathering annually at NASA Ames Research Center, in the heart of Silicon Valley, for 10 weeks of discussions on how to change the future. And you could join them.
The gatherings will be part of what is known as Singularity University, a brand-new academic institution co-founded by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, X Prize chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, and former Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail, and anyone can apply.
Singularity University is less a traditional university and more an institution that will feature intensive 10-week, 10-day, or 3-day programs examining a set of 10 technologies and disciplines, such as future studies and forecasting; biotechnology and bioinformatics; nanotechnology; AI, robotics, and cognitive computing; and finance and entrepreneurship.
The founders anticipate that students will come from all over the world, and they hope the program results in the founding of new companies, the evolution of scientific and technological thinking, and the solidifying of professional and personal networks among the highly-accomplished students and faculty.
To Kurzweil, Singularity University is a place to problem-solve and talk about the results of the most recent iterations of the exponentially growing technologies that have shaped modern life. Among them, he said, are vacuum tubes, integrated circuits, chips and microprocessors.
Now, he said, we are on the threshold of an explosion of the newest such technology, including 3D and self-organizing molecular circuits. And to Kurzweil, the ability to bring together the leaders in this wide range of fields is a rare opportunity to jump-start the future. (The program's name is based on the theories Kurzweil popularized in his best-selling book The Singularity is Near.)
For Diamandis, who previously co-founded the International Space University (a space studies program on which Singularity University will be modeled), the idea of building an interdisciplinary academic institution around the concepts of exponentially growing trends seemed natural--and powerful.
So, after bringing together 50 leading thinkers for a founding conference at NASA Ames, Kurzweil, Diamandis, and Ismail got the backing of Ames' director, Pete Worden, and a commitment of space at the center--a highly visual Silicon Valley landmark along highway 101--for the annual summer programs.
In addition to the core 10-week course, which will be open to graduate and post-graduate students, Singularity University will also offer 3-day and 10-day executive programs. The shorter version will be targeted at CEOs and CTOs, while the 10-day program will be aimed at rising-star executives who want to add to their knowledge and networks.
"These programs are there to give executives a look at what's in the lab today," said Diamandis, "and what is likely to hit the marketplace in the next 5 to 10 years."
This summer, Singularity University will kick off with just 30 or so students and will piggyback on the International Space University, which will host 120 students at NASA Ames. But in following years, the new institution is expected to expand to about 120 students, each of whom could be the next Larry Page or Sergey Brin.
"If we do our job correctly," Diamandis said, students "will meet, (discover their) common visions, and start companies together. They'll have a chance to match a nanotech expert from Russia with an AI expert from Silicon Valley and see what magic happens at the boundaries."
A stellar faculty
As evidence of how seriously many people in the fields of focus take Singularity University, it has pulled together what can only be described as a very impressive roster of faculty.
Among them are The Sims and Spore creator Will Wright; George Smoot, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics; Dan Kammen, co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change team that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore; Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist; and Stephanie Langhoff, NASA Ames' chief scientist.
Befitting the serious nature of the program, its curriculum is not for the faint of heart. The first phase, said Diamandis, is a series of plenary lectures in which all students take the same coursework and learn together about each of the 10 disciplines.
"It's about learning the vocabulary" of the disciplines, Diamandis said, "the basic principles, so they can communicate better between themselves."
In the second phase, students will take deep dives into one of the 10 tracks, typically not one in which they already specialize, learning together in 10-person classes.
And in the final phase, the entire student body will come together to work on a team project.
"This is where the student body will focus as a group in taking on one of the world's grand challenges," said Diamandis, dealing "with global hunger, pandemics, climate change," or something similar.
And while the program's students can expect to work very hard and be deeply immersed in their studies, the faculty will be equally challenged.
"It caused all of us who were invited to be faculty to pause and think about it," said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley-based forecaster who is teaching in the Singularity University program. "We're expected to be there for the full nine weeks, which is a breathtaking commitment of time."
But for Saffo, who is helping to organize the future studies and forecasting track with Kurzweil, being intimately involved with the program at every level is precisely the point.
"The real benefit of teaching is being able to participate," Saffo said. "It would be a waste of time to just show up, give a couple of lectures, and leave."
And while their involvement at any level would bring Singularity University the prestige it needs to recruit talented students and faculty, both Kurzweil and Diamandis said they would be teaching each summer.
For Kurzweil, that means teaching some of the future studies and forecasting classes, and for Diamandis, it means helping to build the curriculum and teaching where he is needed.
The students, meanwhile, will need to pony up some serious money to take part in Singularity University. The base fee for the 10-week program is $25,000, though Diamandis said that there will be a significant number of full and partial scholarships available, funded by private companies, and other contributors.
Ultimately, the results of Singularity University won't be known for some time. But given the people behind it and the likelihood of a steady stream of highly talented students, the odds of it producing the kind of deep thinking and world-changing technology the founders hope for are good.
"I have no doubt that society gets ever more complex, and the consequences of ever-growing technology become ever more difficult to anticipate and respond to," said Saffo. "So having a 10-week program of smart, committed people looking at the challenges from an interdisciplinary point of view can only be a good thing."
According to IBM Research: 'An ultrasensitive silicon cantilever detects the tiny magnetic force between a nanoscale magnetic tip--green--and the hydrogen nuclei present in the virus particles placed at the end of the cantilever--blue, seen in the reflection. Nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging is achieved by manipulating the hydrogen nuclei in the sample with a radiofrequency magnetic field generated by a 'microwire'--red.''
(Credit: IBM Research)IBM Research has built a new nanoscale microscope capable of creating images with 100 million times finer resolution than existing MRI technology.
The breakthrough, announced Monday, was made possible through a process called magnetic resonance force microscopy, which, according to IBM, detects "ultra-small magnetic forces." The technique is said to be able to "see" beneath surfaces and be safe for sensitive biological materials.
IBM said that it ran a test using the new system that established for the first time, magnetic resonance imaging on nanometer-scale items. By running it on a tobacco mosaic virus that is 18 nanometers across--18 billionths of a meter--the new system achieved resolution down to 4 nanometers.
Here is a link to a YouTube video about the technology.
The crew of STS-126, the Space Shuttle launching Friday, will be delivering to the International Space Station a wastewater regeneration system that will recycle astronauts' urine.
(Credit: NASA)If you're the kind of person who wants to do research on the International Space Station, it appears that you may need to cross some boundaries of taste many of us wouldn't even consider.
According to a BBC News story Friday, the crew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, which is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center on Friday afternoon, will be handing off to their Space Station colleagues a water regeneration system designed to, among other things, recycle urine for reuse as fresh water.
The system, which will ionize, filter, distill, and oxidize wastewater, "will make yesterday's coffee into today's coffee," one astronaut told the BBC.
The idea behind the $250 million system seems to have been to figure out a way to ensure that residents of the Space Station had a supply of fresh water. To date, the Space Station has had the luxury of getting water deliveries from newly arrived Space Shuttles. But the Shuttle program is slated for retirement after 2010, and that looks to end the program's role as, among other things, the Space Station's personal water truck.
Still, the system won't be implemented right away. First, NASA wants to be sure that it works, as designed, in a zero-gravity environment.
On Earth, astronaut testers are apparently convinced that the filtration technology works just fine.
"Some people may think it's downright disgusting," Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper told the BBC, "but if it's done correctly, you process water that's purer than what you drink here on Earth."
Some who have tried the recycled water did report a faint taste of iodine, but they didn't see that as a problem.
"Other than that, it is just as refreshing as any other kind of water," said Bob Bagdigian, who ran the system's development. "I've got some in my fridge. It tastes fine to me."
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