Positive Technology Journal

My Beating Heart is an haptic relaxation pillow that gently beats out a slow, steady heart-like rhythm. The $120 heart-shaped pillow uses a rumble pack-style haptic system so that you can feel the heart beat as you hold it.

From the product's website:

My Beating Heart is a soft huggable heart with a soothing heartbeat you can really feel. When hugging the heart, the tactile heartbeat reminds you of holding a pet or a loved-one. Hold the heart a moment and you'll begin to sense your own heartbeat slowly syncing with My Beating Heart's carefully designed rhythm. My Beating Heart is designed to help you relax, daydream, meditate, and nap.

Via Information Aesthetics

A new method for querying relational databases & live data streams through the manipulation of physical objects. Parameterized query fragments are embodied as physical tokens ("parameter wheels"). These tokens are manipulated, interpreted, & graphically augmented on a series of sliding racks, to which data visualizations adapt in real time.

see also bumptop desktop metaphor.

Nature 442, 164-171(13 July 2006)

Leigh R. Hochberg, Mijail D. Serruya, Gerhard M. Friehs, Jon A. Mukand, Maryam Saleh, Abraham H. Caplan, Almut Branner, David Chen, Richard D. Penn and John P. Donoghue

Neuromotor prostheses (NMPs) aim to replace or restore lost motor functions in paralysed humans by routeing movement-related signals from the brain, around damaged parts of the nervous system, to external effectors. To translate preclinical results from intact animals to a clinically useful NMP, movement signals must persist in cortex after spinal cord injury and be engaged by movement intent when sensory inputs and limb movement are long absent. Furthermore, NMPs would require that intention-driven neuronal activity be converted into a control signal that enables useful tasks. Here we show initial results for a tetraplegic human (MN) using a pilot NMP. Neuronal ensemble activity recorded through a 96-microelectrode array implanted in primary motor cortex demonstrated that intended hand motion modulates cortical spiking patterns three years after spinal cord injury. Decoders were created, providing a 'neural cursor' with which MN opened simulated e-mail and operated devices such as a television, even while conversing. Furthermore, MN used neural control to open and close a prosthetic hand, and perform rudimentary actions with a multi-jointed robotic arm. These early results suggest that NMPs based upon intracortical neuronal ensemble spiking activity could provide a valuable new neurotechnology to restore independence for humans with paralysis.

From the project's website 

CatchBob is an experimental platform to elicit collaborative behavior of people working together on a mobile activity. Running on a mobile device (iPAQ, TabletPc), it's a collaborative hunt in which groups of three persons have to find and circle a virtual object on our campus.

Videos of CatchBob!:

• The long video (3:30, .mov, 15.8Mb) can be downloaded here.
• The short version (1:20, .mov, 8.3Mb) can be downloaded there.

Re-blogged from Smart Mobs

From the conference's website 

CSCW 2006 is the premier venue for Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Please join us for the 20^th Anniversary of the first CSCW meeting! We have a number of special events planned as part of our Anniversary celebration.

CSCW has consistently been at the leading edge of thinking about the role of coordination and communication technologies in our lives. With your help, CSCW 2006 will play an important role in continuing this tradition. Come and help us make our 20^th Anniversary of CSCW a stimulating and exciting event.

New this year, CSCW will be running SIGCHI Best Awards programs for the Papers and Notes submission categories. These awards will recognize the most outstanding submissions in these categories.

Contemporary robots and other cognitive artifacts are not yet ready to autonomously operate in complex real world environments. One of the major reasons for this failure in creating cognitive situated systems is the difficulty in the handling of incomplete knowledge and uncertainty.

 

By taking up inspiration from the brains of mammals, including humans, the BACS project will investigate and apply Bayesian models and approaches in order to develop artificial cognitive systems that can carry out complex tasks in real world environments. The Bayesian approach will be used to model different levels of brain function within a coherent framework, from neural functions up to complex behaviors. The Bayesian models will be validated and adapted as necessary according to neuro-physiological data from rats and humans and through psychophysical experiments on humans. The Bayesian approach will also be used to develop four artificial cognitive systems concerned with (i) autonomous navigation, (ii) multi-modal perception and reconstruction of the environment, (iii) semantic facial motion tracking, and (iv) human body motion recognition and behavior analysis. The conducted research shall result in a consistent Bayesian framework offering enhanced tools for probabilistic reasoning in complex real world situations. The performance will be demonstrated through its applications to driver assistant systems and 3D mapping, both very complex real world tasks.

 

BBC News, july 17, 2006

BBC reports that researchers from University of Manchester are developing a new biologically-inspired computer, which mimics the complex interactions between brain neurons.

The computer will be designed with the aim of modelling large numbers of neurons in real time and to track patterns of neural spikes as they occur in the brain. It will be built using large numbers of simple microprocessors designed to interact like the networks of neurons found in the brain. The aim will be to place dozens of microprocessors on single silicon chip reducing the cost and power consumption of the computer.

Read the original article

The Significance of Sigma Neurofeedback Training on Sleep Spindles and Aspects of Declarative Memory.

Appl Psychophysiol Biofeedback. 2006 Jul 15;

Authors: Berner I, Schabus M, Wienerroither T, Klimesch W

The functional significance of sleep spindles for overnight memory consolidation and general learning aptitude as well as the effect of four 10-minute sessions of spindle frequency (11.6-16 Hz, sigma) neurofeedback-training on subsequent sleep spindle activity and overnight performance change was investigated. Before sleep, subjects were trained on a paired-associate word list task after having received either neurofeedback training (NFT) or pseudofeedback training (PFT).Although NFT had no significant impact on subsequent spindle activity and behavioral outcomes, there was a trend for enhanced sigma band-power during NREM (stage 2 to 4) sleep after NFT as compared to PFT. Furthermore, a significant positive correlation between spindle activity during slow wave sleep (in the first night half) and overall memory performance was revealed. The results support the view that the considerable inter-individual variance in sleep spindle activity can at least be partly explained by differences in the ability to acquire new declarative information.We conclude that the short NFT before sleep was not sufficient to efficiently enhance phasic spindle activity and/or to influence memory processing. NFT was, however, successful in increasing sigma power, presumably because sigma NFT effects become more easily evident in actually trained frequency bands than in associated phasic spindle activity.

From Usability News 

The topic of emotion in Human-Computer Interaction is of increasing interest to the HCI community. Since Rosalind Picard's fundamental publications on affective computing, research in this field has gained significant momentum.

Emotion research is largely grounded in psychology yet spans across numerous other disciplines. The challenge of such an interdisciplinary research area is developing a common vocabulary and research framework that a mature discipline requires. What is increasingly needed for advanced and serious work in this field is to place it on a rigorous footing, including developing theoretical fundamentals of HCI-related emotion research, understanding emotions' function in HCI, ethical and legal issues, and the practical implications and consequences for the HCI community.

The first workshop on emotion in HCI held in Edinburgh last year brought an interdisciplinary group of practitioners and researchers together for a lively exchange of ideas, discussion of common problems, and identification of domains to explore.

This year's workshop will build on the success of last year. Focus will be on discussion and joint work on selected topics. Participants will engage in developing further the themes from the first workshop in as wide an application spectrum as possible, such as internet applications, ambient intelligence, office work, control rooms, mobile computing, virtual reality, presence, and home applications.

You are cordially invited to become part of this interdisciplinary forum. This will be a very practical workshop with the participants working together to find new insights, views, ideas and solutions. We therefore invite contributions which will enrich the discussions by their innovative content, fundamental nature, or new perspective. We also encourage demos of products or prototypes related to the topic.
Topics addressed by the workshop are:
- How do applications currently make use of emotions and how could it be improved?
- What makes applications that support affective interactions successful?
- How do we know if affective interactions are successful, and how can we measure this success?
- What value might affective applications, affective systems, and affective interaction have?
- What requirements on sensing technologies are there in HCI?
- What technology is currently available for sensing affective states?
- How reliable is sensing technology?
- Are there reliable and replicable processes to include emotion in HCI design projects?
- What opportunities and risks are there in designing affective applications?
- What are the relationships between emotion, affect, personality, and engagement, and what do they mean for interactive systems design?

To become part of this discussion please submit an extended abstract of your ideas or demo description. Case studies describing current applications or prototypes are strongly encouraged, as well as presentations of products or prototypes that you have developed.

The abstract should be limited to about 800 words. Accepted contributions will be published on the workshop's homepage with the possibility to extend them to short papers of 4 pages. It is also planned to produce a special issue of a journal on the results of the workshop.

Please note that registration to the HCI conference is required in order to take part in the workshop (at least for the day of the workshop). Early bird registration deadline is 21st July.

Dates:

27 June - position paper deadline
11 July - notification of acceptance
21 July - early registration deadline
12 September - workshop

A high-performance brain-computer interface.

Nature. 2006 Jul 13;442(7099):195-8

Authors: Santhanam G, Ryu SI, Yu BM, Afshar A, Shenoy KV

Recent studies have demonstrated that monkeys and humans can use signals from the brain to guide computer cursors. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) may one day assist patients suffering from neurological injury or disease, but relatively low system performance remains a major obstacle. In fact, the speed and accuracy with which keys can be selected using BCIs is still far lower than for systems relying on eye movements. This is true whether BCIs use recordings from populations of individual neurons using invasive electrode techniques or electroencephalogram recordings using less- or non-invasive techniques. Here we present the design and demonstration, using electrode arrays implanted in monkey dorsal premotor cortex, of a manyfold higher performance BCI than previously reported. These results indicate that a fast and accurate key selection system, capable of operating with a range of keyboard sizes, is possible (up to 6.5 bits per second, or approximately 15 words per minute, with 96 electrodes). The highest information throughput is achieved with unprecedentedly brief neural recordings, even as recording quality degrades over time. These performance results and their implications for system design should substantially increase the clinical viability of BCIs in humans.

Re-blogged from Omnibrain 

A joint venture of the Australian National University and the University of Sydney investigated whether repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, TMS, can improve a healthy person's ability to guess accurately the number of elements in a scene, the London Telegraph reported.

The website Pharmabiz provides a good definition of Neuroinformatics:

BrainMap is an online database of published functional neuroimaging experiments with coordinate-based (Talairach) activation locations. The goal of BrainMap is to provide a vehicle to share methods and results of brain functional imaging studies. It is a tool to rapidly retrieve and understand studies in specific research domains, such as language, memory, attention, reasoning, emotion, and perception, and to perform meta-analyses of like studies. 

BrainMap was created and developed by Peter T. Fox and Jack L. Lancaster of the Research Imaging Center of the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio.

Re-blogged from KurzweilAI.net

Via KurzweilAI.net 

Researchers at Columbia University are combining the processing power of the human brain with computer vision to develop a novel device that will allow people to search through images ten times faster than they can on their own. 

The "cortically coupled computer vision system," known as C3 Vision, is the brainchild of professor Paul Sajda, director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Imaging and Neural Computing at Columbia University. He received a one-year, $758,000 grant from Darpa for the project in late 2005.

The brain emits a signal as soon as it sees something interesting, and that "aha" signal can be detected by an electroencephalogram, or EEG cap. While users sift through streaming images or video footage, the technology tags the images that elicit a signal, and ranks them in order of the strength of the neural signatures. Afterwards, the user can examine only the information that their brains identified as important, instead of wading through thousands of images.

Read the full story on Wired 

Via New Scientist 

According to New Scientist, haptic devices (i.e. devices that stimulate our sense of touch) will add a new dimension to communications, entertainment and computer control for everybody, and for people with visual impairment they promise to transform everyday life. One proposed device consists of a headband that imprints the shape of objects in front of it onto the wearer's forehead, something that visually impaired people could find a great help when navigating though a cluttered environment. Moreover, cellphones could soon have a tactile "display", for example, and portable gadgets containing a GPSdevice will be able to nudge you towards your desired destination.

Read the full article