Drawing just 100µW of power and small enough for in-ear earbud use, this TInyML chip family can pull clear speech from the noisiest feeds.
In the past few years, a growing number of computer scientists have been exploring the idea of “metaverse,” an internet-based space where people would be able to virtually perform various everyday activities. The general idea is that, using virtual reality (VR) headsets or other technologies, people might be able to attend work meetings, meet friends, shop, attend events, or visit places, all within a 3D virtual environment.
While the metaverse has recently been the topic of much debate, accessing its 3D “virtual environments” often requires the use of expensive gear and devices, which can only be purchased by a relatively small amount of people. This unavoidably limits who might be able to access this virtual space.
Researchers at Beijing Institute of Technology and JD Explore Academy have recently created WOC, a 3D online chatroom that could be accessible to a broader range of people worldwide. To gain access to this chatroom, which was introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, users merely need a simple computer webcam or smartphone camera.
Large glutamatergic, somatic synapses mediate temporally precise information transfer. In the ventral nucleus of the lateral lemniscus, an auditory brainstem nucleus, the signal of an excitatory large somatic synapse is sign inverted to generate rapid feedforward inhibition with high temporal acuity at sound onsets, a mechanism involved in the suppression of spurious frequency information. The mechanisms of the synaptically driven input–output functions in the ventral nucleus of the lateral lemniscus are not fully resolved. Here, we show in Mongolian gerbils of both sexes that, for stimulation frequencies up to 200 Hz, the EPSC kinetics together with short-term plasticity allow for faithful transmission with only a small increase in latency. Glutamatergic currents are exclusively mediated by AMPARs and NMDARs. Short-term plasticity is frequency-dependent and composed of an initial facilitation followed by depression. Physiologically relevant output generation is limited by the decrease in synaptic conductance through short-term plasticity (STP). At this endbulb synapse, STP acts as a low pass filter and increases the dynamic range of the conductance dependent input–output relation, while NMDAR signaling slightly increases the sensitivity of the input–output function. Our computational model shows that STP-mediated filtering limits the intensity dependence of the spike output, thus maintaining selectivity to sound transients. Our results highlight the interaction of cellular features that together give rise to the computations in the circuit.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Auditory information processing in the brainstem is a prerequisite for generating our auditory representation of the environment. Thereby, many processing steps rely on temporally precise filtering. Precise feedforward inhibition is a key motif in auditory brainstem processing and produced through sign inversion at several large somatic excitatory synapses. A particular feature of the ventral nucleus of the lateral lemniscus is to produce temporally precise onset inhibition with little temporal variance independent of sound intensity. Our cell-physiology and modeling data explain how the synaptic characteristics of different current components and their short-term plasticity are tuned to establish sound intensity-invariant onset inhibition that is crucial for filtering out spurious frequency information.
A study led by researchers from the Institute Cajal of Spanish Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid, Spain in collaboration with the Bioengineering Department of George Mason University in Virginia, U.S. has updated one of the world’s largest databases on neuronal types, Hippocampome.org.
The study, which is published in the journal PLOS Biology, represents the most comprehensive mapping performed to date between neural activity recoded in vivo and identified neuron types. This major breakthrough may enable biologically meaningful computer modeling of the full neuronal circuit of the hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in memory function.
Circuits of the mammalian cerebral cortex are made up of two types of neurons: Excitatory neurons, which release a neurotransmitter called glutamate, and inhibitory neurons, which release GABA (gamma-aminobutanoic acid), the main inhibitor of the central nervous system. “A balanced dialogue between the ‘excitatory’ and ‘inhibitory’ activities is critical for brain function. Identifying the contribution from the several types of excitatory and inhibitory cells is essential to better understand brain operation,” explains Liset Menendez de la Prida, the Director of the Laboratorio de Circuitos Neuronales at the Institute Cajal who leads the study at the CSIC.
Asia’s top chip stocks tumbled Tuesday, ensnared in an escalating US-China tech race that has erased more than $240 billion from the sector’s global market value.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract chipmaker, plunged a record 8.3% while Samsung Electronics Co. and Tokyo Electron Ltd. also declined. The selloff spread to the foreign-exchange market as investors tallied up the damage from the sweeping curbs the US is imposing on companies that conduct technology business with China.
In this episode we explore a User Interface Theory of reality. Since the invention of the computer virtual reality theories have been gaining in popularity, often to explain some difficulties around the hard problem of consciousness (See Episode #1 with Sue Blackmore to get a full analysis of the problem of how subjective experiences might emerge out of our brain neurology); but also to explain other non-local anomalies coming out of physics and psychology, like ‘quantum entanglement’ or ‘out of body experiences’. Do check the devoted episodes #4 and #28 respectively on those two phenomena for a full breakdown.
As you will hear today the vast majority of cognitive scientists believe consciousness is an emergent phenomena from matter, and that virtual reality theories are science fiction or ‘Woowoo’ and new age. One of this podcasts jobs is to look at some of these Woowoo claims and separate the wheat from the chaff, so the open minded among us can find the threshold beyond which evidence based thinking, no matter how contrary to the consensus can be considered and separated from wishful thinking.
So you can imagine my joy when a hugely respected cognitive scientist and User Interface theorist, who can cut through the polemic and orthodoxy with calm, respectful, evidence based argumentation, agreed to come on the show, the one and only Donald D Hoffman.
Hoffman is a full professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, where he studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. His research subjects include facial attractiveness, the recognition of shape, the perception of motion and colour, the evolution of perception, and the mind-body problem. So he is perfectly placed to comment on how we interpret reality.
Continue reading “#29 Don Hoffman PHD — USER INTERFACE THEORY EXPLAINED” »
Francis Heylighen started his career as yet another physicist with a craving to understand the foundations of the universe – the physical and philosophical laws that make everything tick. But his quest for understanding has led him far beyond the traditional limits of the discipline of physics. Currently he leads the Evolution, Complexity and COgnition group (ECCO) at the Free University of Brussels, a position involving fundamental cybernetics research cutting across almost every discipline. Among the many deep ideas he has pursued in the last few decades, one of the most tantalizing is that of the Global Brain – the notion that the social, computational and communicative matrix increasingly enveloping us as technology develops, may possess a kind of coherent intelligence in itself.
I first became aware of Francis and his work in the mid-1990s via the Principia Cybernetica project – an initiative to pursue the application of cybernetic theory to modern computer systems. Principia Cybernetica began in 1989, as a collaboration between Heylighen, Cliff Joslyn, and the late great Russian physicist, dissident and systems theorist Valentin Turchin. And then 1993, very shortly after Tim Berners-Lee released the HTML/HTTP software framework and thus created the Web, the Principia Cybernetica website went online. For a while after its 1993 launch, Principia Cybernetica was among the largest and most popular sites on the Web. Today the Web is a different kind of place, but Principia Cybernetica remains a unique and popular resource for those seeking deep, radical thinking about the future of technology, mind and society.
Amid much speculation and research about how our genetics affect the way we age, a University of California, Berkeley, study now shows that individual differences in our DNA matter less as we get older and become prone to diseases of aging, such as diabetes and cancer.
In a study of the relative effects of genetics, aging and the environment on how some 20,000 human genes are expressed, the researchers found that aging and environment are far more important than genetic variation in affecting the expression profiles of many of our genes as we get older. The level at which genes are expressed — that is, ratcheted up or down in activity — determines everything from our hormone levels and metabolism to the mobilization of enzymes that repair the body.
“How do your genetics — what you got from your sperm donor and your egg donor and your evolutionary history — influence who you are, your phenotype, such as your height, your weight, whether or not you have heart disease?” said Peter Sudmant, UC Berkeley assistant professor of integrative biology and a member of the campus’s Center for Computational Biology. “There’s been a huge amount of work done in human genetics to understand how genes are turned on and off by human genetic variation. Our project came about by asking, ‘How is that influenced by an individual’s age?’ And the first result we found was that your genetics actually matter less the older you get.”
❤️ Check out Lambda here and sign up for their GPU Cloud: https://lambdalabs.com/papers.
📝 My paper “The flow from simulation to reality” with clickable citations is available here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01788-5
📝 Read it for free here! https://rdcu.be/cWPfD
Continue reading “Wow, A Simulation That Looks Like Reality! 🤯” »
Circa 2015 face_with_colon_three
From driving water wheels to turning turbines, waterhas been used as the prime mover of machinery and the powerhouse of industry for many centuries. In ancient times, the forces of flowing water were even harnessed to power the first rudimentaryclocks. Now, engineers at Stanford University have created the world’s first water-operated computer. Using magnetized particles flowing through a micro-miniature network ofchannels, the machine runs like clockwork and is claimed to be capable ofperforming complex logical operations.
Continue reading “Engineers create a computer with a water droplet processor” »
