Positive Technology Journal

Via Mauro Cherbini's moleskin 

An experimental study of the emergence of human communication systems [pdf]

Author: B. Galantucci

Cognitive Science, (29):737–767, 2005.

The emergence of human communication systems is typically investigated via 2 approaches with complementary strengths and weaknesses: naturalistic studies and computer simulations. This study was conducted with a method that combines these approaches. Pairs of participants playedvideogames requiring communication. Members of a pair were physically separated but exchanged graphic signals through a medium that prevented the use of standard symbols (e.g., letters). Communication systems emerged and developed rapidly during the games, integrating the use of explicit signs with information implicitly available to players and silent behavior-coordinating procedures. The systems that emerged suggest 3 conclusions: (a)signs originate from different mappings;(b)sign systems developp arsimoniously; (c) sign forms are perceptually distinct, easy to produce, and tolerant to variations.

From Networked Performance

"Global Conflict: Palestine gives the option of three perspectives. A game based in the midst of the conflict in the Palestinian territories is set to be the latest release in the trend of politically-conscious gaming. Global Conflict: Palestine centres on the activities of a young journalist. The player must navigate between different Palestinian and Israeli sources to get to the truth of a story. "You can take a pro-Palestinian angle, a balanced angle, or a pro-Israeli angle," said Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, of Serious Games Interactive. Mr Egenfeldt-Nielsen told the BBC's Culture Shock programme: "The game is much more about the personal experience; the emotional experience."

The player walks around a city resembling Jerusalem and its surrounding areas talking to people. As the conflict intensifies, however, the situation becomes increasingly complex and exposes some of the reasons for the ongoing violence ... Different perspectives: Global Conflict: Palestine, which is released early next year, follows music channel MTV's internet-based Darfur Is Dying, which went online earlier this year and had 700,000 players in its first month. Later, tens of thousands of players sent e-mail messages to politicians to urge action over Darfur."

From Middle-East Conflict Informs Game, BBC News.

Via Networked Performance 

10November 2006 - 12 November2006
Amsterdam, Mediamatic

10:00 hr, from 10.11.06 t/m 12.11.06
Oosterdokskade 5
Amsterdam
T 020 638 9901
http://www.mediamatic.net

Tiny chips, cheap sensors and the possibilities of emerging smart fabrics, conductive yarns and cheap wireless communication (bluetooth or even rfid) make wearables easier and cheaper to make. Arduino boards are small physical computing platforms: Arduino developed a fairly simple integrated development environment to deal with the small portable input/output board. With all these tools at our fingertips, nothing is stopping us from making our own smart coats, reactive hats and luminescent skirts.

To help you get started, Mediamatic is organizing a wearables workshop where you can develop your own Arduino-driven wearable. Assisted by Massimo Banzi, one of the creators of the Arduino board and several coding/soldering/sewing helpers, you have three days to make your prototype in the stimulating surroundings of the Mediamatic Winter Garden.

What?
During the workshop, you will design your own wearable. You will define the sensor inputs and the actuator outputs. You will program the Arduino board to react correctly to the different inputs. You will do this in Arduino's own IDE, which helps you write a kind of simplified Java code similar to Processing. Then you will stitch/glue/felt together your prototype so you can participate in the wearables fashion show!

Who?
Computer scientists, fashion designers, hardware hackers, art students, fabric experts, product developers, dancers- everyone is welcome. However, note that some technical affinity is required. Some experience in programming and electronics is useful, specifically in soldering and java, but not strictly necessary. We would advice participants to come in teams of max. 3 people, so you can distribute soldering, coding and sewing tasks.

Where?
The workshop will take place in the latest Mediamatic exhibition: the Winter Garden. The Winter Garden is an indoor botanical garden filled with plants and robots. From the minimalistic electronic creatures of Ralf Schreiber to the virtual forest of Michiel Samyn to the interactive plant by Christa Sommerer and
Laurent Mignonneau to the pheromone tinged garden benches of Mateusz Herczka and the communicative crickets of Felix Hess- the Winter Garden is full of wonders.

What to bring?
If there is a specific sensor or actuator you would like to use during the workshop, we advise you to bring it yourself. You can also bring the actual clothing article beforehand, and not sew it during the workshop, or you can bring fabric and other material for the base of your wearable. You'll have to bring your own laptop to do your coding, and we advise you to download the Arduino software and have a look at it beforehand. Also, bring lunch.

How to prepare?
Besides looking at the Arduino software you can have a look at the Mediamatic wearables reader - a collection of interesting articles, websites and blogposts that can get you started in the world of wearables. Virtual Platform and V2 are organizing a wearables symposium in Rotterdam called Fleshing Out the day before the Mediamatic Arduino workshop with speakers such as Ionat Zurr (SymbioticA: the art and science collaborative research laboratory), Tobie Kerridge (Royal College of Art, London) and Joanna Berzowska (Design and Computation Arts , Concordia University, Montreal).

When?
The Fleshing Out Symposium is on Thursday November 9th at V2. The Mediamatic Arduino Wearables Workshop is from Friday November 10th to Sunday November 12th. The Kiem Cuisine Wearables dinner is Friday at 19:30 at Mediamatic. The Wearables fashion show is Sunday evening at 18:00.

Costs?
The Fleshing out symposium costs 40 euros. Students receive a discount of 20 euros. The Wearable Arduino workshop costs 125 euros. Dutch students receive a discount of 50 euros.

From Networked Performance

EvoMUSART 2007: 5th European Workshop on Evolutionary Music and Art: 11-13 April, 2007, Valencia, Spain: EVOSTAR: EVOMUSART: "ArtEscapes: Variations of Life in the Media Arts"

The use of biological inspired techniques for the development of artistic systems is a recent, exciting and significant area of research. There is a growing interest in the application of these techniques in fields such as: visual art and music generation, analysis, and interpretation; sound synthesis; architecture; video; and design.

EvoMUSART 2007 is the fifth workshop of the EvoNet working group on Evolutionary Music and Art. Following the success of previous events and the growth of interest in the field, the main goal of EvoMUSART 2007 is to bring together researchers who are using biological inspired techniques for artistic tasks, providing the opportunity to promote, present and discuss ongoing work in the area.

The workshop will be held from 11-13 April, 2007 in Valencia, Spain, as part of the Evo* event.

The event includes the exhibition "ArtEscapes: Variations of Life in the Media Arts", giving an opportunity for the presentation of evolutionary art and music. The submission of art works for the exhibition session is independent from the submission of papers.

Accepted papers will be presented orally at the workshop and included in the EvoWorkshops proceedings, published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Further information can be found on the following pages:
Evo*2007: http://www.evostar.org
EvoMUSART2007: http://evonet.lri.fr/TikiWiki/tiki-index.php?page=EvoMUSART

Via Networked Performance

Brain Waves Drawing: Live Performance by Hideki Nakazawa: Nov 4-5, 2006 at Fuchu Art Museum, Tokyo Supported by Nihon Kohden.

Not to Draw by Hand. To Draw by Brain: Artists usually draw pictures by hand with brushes or pencils. However, the activities of brains must be more important and essential than the ones of hands at the moment of creating art. Therefore, I decided to draw pictures with electrodes being set on my head through controlling the activities of my own brain. The curved lines so-called "brain waves" in medicine must be the "drawings" in the world of fine art, directly drawn by my brain without using hands.

Re-blogged from InfoAesthetics

Vizter is a sophisticated social network data visualization system that end-users of social networking services can use to facilitate discovery & increased awareness of their online community. vizster presents social networks using a simple network node-link representation, where nodes represent members of the system & links represent the articulated 'friendship' links between them. network members are depicted using both their self-provided name & a representative image. the networks are presented as 'egocentric' networks, consisting of an individual & their immediate friends. users can expand the display by selecting nodes to make visible others’ immediate friends as well. in addition, inferred community groupings of two or more nodes are visibly represented as 'blobs' surrounding community members, taking advantage of low spatial frequencies to make community structures apparent.

Via Medgadget

BioMAP (Biological Marker of Auditory Processing) is a new, easy-to-use diagnostic tool that can quickly identify a sizeable subset of learning disabled children. Based on more than a decade of neuroscience research at Northwestern University, it is expected to become one of the most important resources for learning disabilities specialists trying to identify appropriate treatments for children with dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities:

"Learning disabilities are believed to affect nearly one in 10 children, but their causes are difficult to pinpoint," says Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern University's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory. Kraus and Northwestern researchers Trent Nicol and Steven Zecker have found that a third of the 1,000-plus children they have tested show a dysfunction in the way the brainstem encodes basic sounds of speech...

"The beauty of BioMAP as a diagnostic tool is that it does not require a child to follow directions or perform an assigned task," says Kraus. "Instead, it objectively measures whether a child's nervous system is able to accurately translate sounds into brain waves." If it can't, the affected child will have difficulty discriminating between speech sounds. And that difficulty at the most fundamental level complicates a wide range of learning activities, including reading and writing, Kraus finds.

Getting objective measures from BioMAP software is simple. "All a child needs to do is stay awake and sit quietly for 20 to 30 minutes," says Kraus, Northwestern's Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences, Neurobiology and Otolaryngology.

Re-blogged from KurzweilAI.net

A new device being created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University uses electrodes attached to the neck and face to detect the movements that occur as a person silently mouths words and phrases.

Using this data, a computer can work out the sounds being formed and then build these sounds up into words. The system is then able to translate the words into another language, which is read out by a synthetic voice.

Read the full story

Re-blogged from Kurzweil.net

Researchers at the University of Portsmouth have developed an electronic switch based on DNA, a world-first bionanotechnology breakthrough that provides the foundation for the interface between living organisms and the computer world...

Read the full story here  

Via IEET 

Have a look at this very interesting article entitled "Cognitive Enhancement: Methods, Ethics, Regulatory Challenges" written by Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg. It focuses on the current state of the art in cognitive enhancement methods and consider their prospects for the near-term future. Authors also review some of ethical issues arising from these technologies.

Re-blogged from Textually.org

According to Undeniable Facts with 10 cell phones, you can make goldfish do a flip [via Digg]

There's even a video to prove it:

7-8-9 February 2007 Geneva, Switzerland. From the LIFT conference website 

LIFT is a gathering of talented observers, explorers, and builders who discuss the current challenges and creative solutions presented by emerging technologies. LIFT is three days to face cutting edge business models, bold predictions, radical thinking, and get new ideas to inject into your own part of the planet.

LIFT has a simple goal: connect people who are passionate about new applications of technology and propel their conversations into the broader world to improve life and work.

Who will talk? Adam Greenfield, Frédéric Kaplan, Sampo Karjalainen, Anne Galloway, Paola Ghillani, Julian Bleecker, Daniel Kaplan, Christophe Guignard, Jan Christophe Zoels, Colin Henderson, Nathan Eagle, Bernino Lind, Lee Bryant, Daniela Cerqui, Jan Chipchase, Beth Krasna, Régine Debatty, Stephanie Hannon, Pierre Chappaz, and many others.

The event will be held at the Geneva International Conference Center. It is organized by a group of international practitioners.

Zack Lynch (Brainwaves) has announced the launch of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization:

The Neurotechnology Industry Organization (NIO) is “a non-profit trade association that represents a broad spectrum of companies involved in neurotechnology (drugs, devices and diagnostics), neuroscience research centers and brain disease advocacy groups across the United States and the world. NIO’s mission is to accelerate cures for brain and nervous system diseases by promoting the neurotechnology industry’s progress, advocating the industry’s position to government officials, and providing business development services to its members”

PT wishes you good luck for your organization, Zack!

Error mapping controller: a closed loop neuroprosthesis controlled by artificial neural networks  

Authors: Alessandra Pedrocchi, Simona Ferrante, Elena De Momi and Giancarlo Ferrigno

Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, Oct 25 2006

Background: The design of an optimal neuroprostheses controller and its clinical use presents several challenges. First, the physiological system is characterized by highly inter-subjects varying properties and also by non stationary behaviour with time, due to conditioning level and fatigue. Secondly, the easiness to use in routine clinical practice requires experienced operators. Therefore, feedback controllers, avoiding long setting procedures, are required. Methods: The error mapping controller (EMC) here proposed uses artificial neural networks (ANNs) both for the design of an inverse model and of a feedback controller. A neuromuscular model is used to validate the performance of the controllers in simulations. The EMC performance is compared to a Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) included in an anti wind-up scheme (called PIDAW) and to a controller with an ANN as inverse model and a PID in the feedback loop (NEUROPID). In addition tests on the EMC robustness in response to variations of the Plant parameters and to mechanical disturbances are carried out. Results: The EMC shows improvements with respect to the other controllers in tracking accuracy, capability to prolong exercise managing fatigue, robustness to parameter variations and resistance to mechanical disturbances. Conclusion: Different from the other controllers, the EMC is capable of balancing between tracking accuracy and mapping of fatigue during the exercise. In this way, it avoids overstressing muscles and allows a considerable prolongation of the movement. The collection of the training sets does not require any particular experimental setting and can be introduced in routine clinical practice.

Long-term motor cortex plasticity induced by an electronic neural implant

Nature advance online publication 22 October 2006 | doi:10.1038/nature05226

Authors: Andrew Jackson, Jaideep Mavoori and Eberhard E. Fetz

It has been proposed that the efficacy of neuronal connections is strengthened when there is a persistent causal relationship between presynaptic and postsynaptic activity. Such activity-dependent plasticity may underlie the reorganization of cortical representations during learning, although direct in vivo evidence is lacking. Here we show that stable reorganization of motor output can be induced by an artificial connection between two sites in the motor cortex of freely behaving primates. An autonomously operating electronic implant used action potentials recorded on one electrode to trigger electrical stimuli delivered at another location. Over one or more days of continuous operation, the output evoked from the recording site shifted to resemble the output from the corresponding stimulation site, in a manner consistent with the potentiation of synaptic connections between the artificially synchronized populations of neurons. Changes persisted in some cases for more than one week, whereas the output from sites not incorporated in the connection was unaffected. This method for inducing functional reorganization in vivo by using physiologically derived stimulus trains may have practical application in neurorehabilitation after injury.

Via KurzweilAI.net

An implantable silicon chip that faithfully mimics the neural circuitry of a real retina could lead to better bionic eyes for those with vision loss and would remove the need for a camera and external computer.

The top image shows the raw output of the retina chip, the middle one a picture processed from it and the third shows how a moving face would appear.

The chip, created by University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University researchers, measures 3.5 x 3.3 millimeters and contains 5760 silicon phototransistors, which take the place of light-sensitive neurons in a living retina. These are connected up to 3600 transistors, which mimic the nerve cells that process light information and pass it on to the brain for higher processing. There are 13 different types of transistor, each with slightly different performance, mimicking different types of actual nerve cells.

Read full article

Via Human Productivity Lab

Toshiba has unveiled a new head-mounted display - the "Hyper-Reality Head-Dome Projector" that allows the wearer to experience a full 360-degree view on a 40 centimetre dome-shaped screen... here are some technical details (from SID2006)

the system consists of a compact dome-shaped screen with a radius of 40 cm, a mobile projector with ultra-wide projection lens, and LED light sources. The system exhibits a wide viewing angle of 120° horizontally by 70° vertically without head tracking, and 360° × 360° with head tracking.

 

Via Mauro Cherubini's weblog

The always interesting Mauro Cherubini's moleskin has a post about a tool for designing a content that utilize plants as an input-output interface. Dubbed I/O Plant, the system allows to connect actuators, sensors and database servers to living plants, making them a part of an electric circuit or a network terminal.

From WashingtonPost.com

Researchers at Cornell University's Weill Medical College in New York, the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J., have tried deep-brain stimulation (a procedure that involves inserting tiny electrodes into the brain to stimulate specific regions) on a patient in a minimally conscious state. In previous studies, DBS has been successfully used for treating Parkinson's disease, severe pain, epilepsy, depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The patient was a 38-year-old man who had suffered a severe brain injury that left him in a minimally conscious state for six years, unable to communicate or function. After an intensive four-month evaluation to assess his capabilities, surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic implanted electrodes into parts of his brain known as the thalamus, believed to be involved in helping integrate the functions of other areas.

According to the researchers, the stimulation promoted significant improvement in the man's abilities to move, communicate and function, including his abilities to eat and respond verbally. They reported that even when the stimulation is off, the patient continues to demonstrate improved "gestural and verbal communication abilities," which suggests that the stimulation may be having lasting effects on his brain. These findings were presented at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Atlanta.