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Weekly QUEST Discussion Topics and News April 12th, 2013 This week, we are happy to have some colleagues from Rome NY lead the discussion. Please see below for a brief description of the subject matter. Cogent Confabulation: From Statistical Inference to Neuromorphic Architectures Cogent confabulation originates from the maximum likelihood estimation method, a branch of statistical inference. After simplification in formulations, optimization in algorithmic implementation and adaptation to real-world applications, the structure of the confabulation method becomes analogous to the human brain in many operational aspects. The general term, "inference method", has been used by many academic research groups and on-going government research programs. At AFRL, we have done in-depth research on confabulation models for natural languages and just started the research on special-temporal vehicle behavioral modeling. News Articles 1. Kurzweil article from Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299,00.ht ml Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self…Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans…According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away…All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties…ifficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It's not a fringe idea; it's a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There's an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it's an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation…three-year-old Singularity University, which offers inter-disciplinary courses of study for graduate students and executives, is hosted by NASA. Google was a founding sponsor; its CEO and co-founder Larry Page spoke there last year…Singularity isn't a wholly new idea, just newish. In 1965 the British mathematician I.J. Good described something he called an "intelligence explosion": Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make…. word singularity is borrowed from astrophysics: it refers to a point in space-time — for example, inside a black hole — at which the rules of ordinary physics do not apply…Kurzweil was also pursuing a parallel career as a futurist: he has been publishing his thoughts about the future of human and machine-kind for 20 years, most recently in The Singularity Is Near, which was a best seller when it came out in 2005. A documentary by the same name, starring Kurzweil, Tony Robbins and Alan Dershowitz, among others, was released in January…As the Singularity's most visible champion, he has heard all the questions and faced down the incredulity many, many times before…Kurzweil then ran the numbers on a whole bunch of other key technological indexes — the falling cost of manufacturing transistors, the rising clock speed of microprocessors, the plummeting price of dynamic RAM. He looked even further afield at trends in biotech and beyond — the falling cost of sequencing DNA and of wireless data service and the rising numbers of Internet hosts and nanotechnology patents. He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating progress. "It's really amazing how smooth these trajectories are," he says. "Through thick and thin, war and peace, boom times and recessions." Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly…Here's what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity — never say he's not conservative — at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today…In addition to the Singularity University, which Kurzweil co-founded, there's also a Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, based in San Francisco. It counts among its advisers Peter Thiel, a former CEO of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook…it's well known that one cause of the physical degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can't reproduce anymore and dies. But there's an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process; it's one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular noncancerous cells with telomerase? In November, researchers at Harvard Medical School announced in Nature that they had done just that. They administered telomerase to a group of mice suffering from age-related degeneration. The damage went away. The mice didn't just get better; they got younger…Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they'll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans. Alternatively, by then we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots. He and many other Singularitarians take seriously the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal…Actual AIs tend to be able to master only one highly specific domain, like interpreting search queries or playing chess. They operate within an extremely specific frame of reference. They don't make conversation at parties. They're intelligent, but only if you define intelligence in a vanishingly narrow way. The kind of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about, which is called strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn't exist yet…it's also possible that there are things going on in our brains that can't be duplicated electronically no matter how many MIPS you throw at them. The neurochemical architecture that generates the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too complex and analog to replicate in digital silicon…Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being — in other words, a computer that could pass the Turing test. (Very loosely speaking, such a computer would be able to pass as human in a blind test.) Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness — a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know? It's called the Blue Brain project, and it's an attempt to create a neuron-by-neuron simulation of a mammalian brain, using IBM's Blue Gene super-computer. So far, Markram's team has managed to simulate one neocortical column from a rat's brain, which contains about 10,000 neurons. Markram has said that he hopes to have a complete virtual human brain up and running in 10 years. (Even Kurzweil sniffs at this. If it worked, he points out, you'd then have to educate the brain, and who knows how long that would take?)… 2. Google Glass ventures http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/a-venture-capitalpartnership-for-google-glass-apps/ Three prominent venture capital funds want software developers to know they are on the hunt for apps and software for Google Glass, the company’s Internet-connected glasses… Glass Collective, an investment partnership. The three firms said they had agreed to share every pitch from start-ups related to Glass, so each firm would have the chance to invest…an efficient way for software and hardware developers to get their ideas in front of three prominent venture capital firms and to jump-start developers’ creativity in thinking about ways to use the new hardware…fund, which operates separately from Google, invests up to $250,000 in this type of early-stage start-up…Just as other mobile platforms competed with the iPhone, other wearable computing platforms are expected to compete with Glass, like Internet-connected watches or bracelets. The investors said, though, that they are focused narrowly on the glasses….He said he is interested, for instance, in health care apps, like online fitness trainers who could coach people as they were exercising. Mr. Maris said he imagined ways that people could benefit from accessing the Internet hands-free, like people with physical disabilities being able to send text messages or scientists being able to look up information while working in the lab… 3. Passthoughts instead of passwords http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/04/10/your-next-passwordpassthought/print#ixzz2Q6w6FU6S The bar for log-in security has officially been raised with the most private password of all time: a thought…Led by John Chuang of the UC Berkeley School of Information, a team of researchers have developed a device that verifies a user’s identity with brainwaves, or electroencephalograms (EEGs). Rather than an alphanumerical text password, this new device uses a “pass-thought.” Chuang and his team developed the system with a $100 Neurosky Mindset headset that uses Bluetooth technology to authenticate a person to the computer…While wearing the headset, volunteers performed a series of seven mental tasks while researchers measured their brainwaves. First, all study participants performed the same three tasks: focusing on their breathing, imagining their finger moving up and down, listening for an audio tone and then responding by focusing on a dot on a piece of paper once the tone was heard. Taking EEG measurements of these tasks created a brainwave baseline of sorts for each individual…By measuring the subject’s unique brainwaves during this personalized cycle of tasks and cross referencing them with their baseline measurements, researchers were able to glean a unique EEG signature so that each “passthought” could identify individual users and distinguish them from other participants…By customizing each participant’s authentication threshold via the headset, researchers reduced error rates below one percent, which is comparable to more-invasive methods for measuring multi-channel EEG signals… 4. Nuance voice ads http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513001/nuance-thinksvoice-ads-could-be-a-mobile-hit/ In online advertising lingo, the acronym CPC refers to “cost per click”—the amount an advertiser pays whenever someone clicks on an ad. If voice-recognition technology company Nuance gets its way, though, it could soon have an additional meaning: “cost per conversation.”… Nuance is today announcing Voice Ads, a platform that will let companies create ads that people can talk to on smartphones and tablets. Mike McSherry, vice president of advertising and content at Nuance, says these could range from car ads that let you ask questions about the vehicle shown to ads for a sports network that allow you to get information about who won last night’s game or what time tonight’s game starts…Nuance, a company that was spun out of SRI International in the 1990s and now powers the voice-recognition capabilities included on billions of cellphones and in millions of cars, believes the time is right for mobile voice ads because many consumers have been primed by voice interactions on smartphones, such as with Apple’s digital assistant, Siri, and Google Voice Search on Android devices…Meanwhile, the mobile ad space is growing rapidly as the popularity of smartphones and tablets skyrockets. Data from eMarketer indicates spending on mobile ads climbed to $8.4 billion last year from $4 billion a year earlier. This is expected to rise to $37 billion by 2016…On an iPhone, McSherry gave an example of what Nuance thinks would make a mobile ad more appealing: a voice-enabled ad for a fictional brand, Alpha Deodorant, featuring a talking magic 8 ball that has been pre-programmed with about 50 different spoken responses to account for various scenarios (including ones where it doesn’t really know what you’re talking about)… One vestige of existing online ads that will likely remain with Voice Ads is the idea of clicking. For fear of invading users’ privacy, the ads will not just pop open the microphone on your smartphone and start listening to you—rather, ads might have a little microphone icon that users click to start the conversation, McSherry says….