Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

WASHINGTON: Dutch researchers at the Technical University of Delft have designed a micro airplane that mimics the swift. The swift is not only the smallest soaring bird, but can go up to three years without landing.

Named RoboSwift, the micro airplane has shape-shifting, adjustable wings that allow it to manoeuvre at very high or low speeds.

With a wingspan of about one-and-a-half feet and weighing just under three ounces, the remote-controlled Roboswift is slightly larger and heavier than a common swift. But like the common swift, the robot can change its wing shape and surface area to glide or dive.

According to its designers, the robotic bird could prove useful in conducting surveys over disaster areas, or to peek in on suspicious people. . . .

More information:
Robotic Swift that flies and spies, The Times of India
Roboswift – Bio-inspired morphing-wing micro aerial vehicle

A major challenge for pioneers in artificial intelligence has been to create a living neural network on an artificial substrate. Researching the field known as nanobiotechnology, Tel Aviv University scientists have shown that it is possible to store rudimentary memories in an artificial culture of live neurons. They are apparently the first in the world to have actually stored information in a cultured neural network for an extended period.

Published in Physical Review E last month, TAU physics Professors Itay Baruchi and Eshel Ben-Jacob report the ability to record information in a man-made network of neurons. They say this is a step toward a cyborg-like amalgamation of living material and memory chips. The research may also help neurologists understand how our brains learn and store information.

This is the first time, says Ben-Jacob, that multiple rudimentary memories have been imprinted in neural networks cultured outside the brain. . .

More information:
Living Neural Networks Could Drive War Machines
TAU takes first steps in creating living cyberbrain | Jerusalem Post
Time-invariant person-specific frequency templates in human brain activity ( 2006 article Baruchi/Ben-Jacob )
Towards neuro-memory-chip: Imprinting multiple memories in cultured neural networks ( not free $25 )

By tapping directly into the brain’s electrical signals, scientists at John’s Hopkins University, in Baltimore, are on their way to developing a prosthetic hand more dexterous than ever before. They have demonstrated for the first time that neural activity recorded from a monkey’s brain can control fingers on a robotic hand, making it play several notes on a piano.

“We would hope that eventually, we’ll be able to implant similar arrays permanently in the motor cortex of human subjects,” says Mark Schieber, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester, in New York, who is working on the project. However, researchers caution that a practical human version of the neural interface is still a long way off. . . .

. . . To make the neural interface, researchers recorded brain-cell activity from monkeys as they moved their fingers in different ways. (A particular part of the motor cortex has previously been shown to control finger movement.) The scientists then created algorithms to decode these brain signals by identifying the specific activity patterns linked to particular movements. When the decoding system was connected to a robotic hand and fed new neural-activity patterns, the fingers on the hand performed the intended movement 95 percent of the time. . .

More information
Playing the piano with a robotic hand