Computer Graphics  

A newly developed technology that uses an inexpensive facial mapping method can recreate and replace faces of celebrities, but the technology may also have applications in creating digital avatars and mindclones.

Soon, nearly everyone with a computer will be able to create inexpensive, controllable computer models of famous people’s faces in 3D just using online photos of celebrities, or anyone.

"This capability opens up the ability to create puppets for any photo collection of a person, without requiring them to be scanned," write the researchers from the University of Washington.

The researchers also were able to recreate idiosyncrasies, like facial ticks, of the celebrities they modeled, including Kevin Spacey and Daniel Craig. This work could let us interact with digital avatars that look and act like people we know.

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Typically, creating CGI models of a human face is expensive and requires laser scanning and motion capture technology. The researchers postulated that for celebrities, there are more than enough paparazzi photographs online to capture digitally what they look like from just about every possible angle.

"The idea was to create realistic virtual models of people just from photos rather than complex lab set-ups," says researcher Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman. Led by Supasorn Suwajanakorn, the team collected around 200 photos each of various famous people from Google Images, taken in different poses and at varying angles.

"Don't underestimate how much people want to be someone else."

The photos were analysed using face-tracking software, and a realistic 3D model for their face and head created. Further analysis added wrinkles and textures that appear and disappear as expressions change.

"The result is a full 3D model you can turn right around," says Suwajanakorn.

As well as being able to manipulate the digital puppets any way they wanted, the team found they could realistically switch an actor's face with that of another – allowing them to be replaced throughout an entire TV show or movie, for example.

A real potential commercial application could be to provide famous animated faces for visual versions of Siri-like assistants, says Suwajanakorn. Another might be to automatically create 3D faces for telepresence robots, says Nicole Carey at humanoid robot maker Engineered Arts in Penryn, UK. "Don't underestimate how much people want to be someone else," she says.

The face of someone who has died could be recreated and driven with one of the emerging breed of chatbots trained – using the deceased's tweets and emails – to converse like them.

The system may also be useful for creating mindclones. "Our model could bring back your memories of the people you care about," says Suwajanakorn.




SOURCE  New Scientist

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 Transhumanism  

Speaking at the 2013 Global Futures International Congress, Martine Rothblatt explains how the end goal of technology is to overcome death. From therapeutic pharmaceuticals, to mindclones Rothblatt paints a detailed picture of the potential of digital immortality.

Recently talks given at the 2013 conference, Global Future 2045 International Congress were made available online.  One of the most inspirational discussions was given by Martine Rothblatt, on how technology's overall goal is to end death.

Well known to the transhumanist community, Rothblatt, the visionary entrepreneur,  lawyer, author, and founder of Sirius satellite radio and United Therapeutics.

"Described broadly biotechnology is the creation of medical tools to enhance life processes. What is rarely even whispered, though, is that the real goal of biotechnology is the end of death."

Rothblatt, the author of Virtually Human: The Promise---and the Peril---of Digital Immortality, describes the critical skills the technology entrepreneur needs based on her experience in satellite communications and life science companies to achieve living mindclones in the decades ahead.

According to Rothblatt, closely related to these entrepreneurial skills are the social and policy interactions needed with governments and NGOs.  Through this, Rothblatt is working to help ensure the Avatar Project of the 2045 Initiative is welcomed as a positive contribution to building the world as it should be.

Rothblatt's expertise in biotechnology came from her role in saving her daughter's life. Motivated by her daughter being diagnosed with life-threatening pulmonary hypertension, Rothblatt entered the world of the life sciences by first creating the PPH Cure Foundation and later by founding United Therapeutics. "Today instead of three thousand people having pulmonary hypertension, 60,000 people have it, that's because there are 57,000 people who have it who would otherwise be dead, but are alive because a pharmaceutical treatments that are able to help them manage their condition."

"Biotechnology creates some of mankind’s most remarkable and much loved products, from treatments to forestall blindness to cures for several cancers. Described broadly biotechnology is the creation of medical tools to enhance life processes. What is rarely even whispered, though, is that the real goal of biotechnology is the end of death," describes Rothblatt. "This is taboo because it is politically incorrect at best, and Galilean in its challenge to established theology and moral philosophy. Nevertheless, because biotechnologists undertake to cure diseases, and because death is generally the victory of disease over life, the ultimate goal of biotechnology is in fact the end of at least unwanted, non-violent and non-accidental death. "

Rothblatt thinks that the next step for biotechnology is in the cybernetic and digital domain. "The vanguard of biotechnology is in the digital domain where preparations are being made for transplanting the mind from a diseased brain, or an end-stage diseased body, to a computational substrate. I call this process creating a mindclone, and it enables effective immortality for a person’s consciousness."

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Working with David Hanson, she has created a prototype of this first mindclone prototype, Bina 48 (shown above).   Rothblatt intends to "transplant" minds into robotic Avatar prosthetics like Bina 48.

According to Rothblatt, the mindcloning process involves: creating a mindfile, a collection of your mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values.  This can be based on computer files, cloud files or even your Facebook account.

"Over the next two or three decades, there is a rapid effort to develop 'mindware,'" states Rothblatt. "Mindware is software that analyzes a mindfile, tunes itself to reflect a consciousness operating persona that reflects the same mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values that are in your mindfile. So mindware is a consciousness operating system."

Rothblatt argues the development of artificial intelligence, including deep learning, today is essentially the development of mindware.


SOURCE  2045 Initiative

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 Uncanny Valley  

Computer graphics artist Chris Jones has created one very realistic looking head using the latest software.  His short video of the piece called 'Ed' must be seen.

Australian-based computer game artist Chris Jones has created one of the most realistic human head simulations we've seen.

One person commented on Sploid, "This IS the most realistic human face I've ever seen produced via computer; however it's so perfect that something still screams uncanny valley."

The head, 'Ed,' was made with Lightwave, Sculptris and Krita, and composited with Davinci Resolve Lite. Jones also created the music for the video.  It has been an ongoing work for the artist.

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Jones has worked as a freelance children’s book illustrator, and following graduation with and industrial design degree, continued illustrating and animating before becoming a computer game artist at Beam Software (later to become Infogrames).

He left Infogrames in May 2000 to work full-time on a film called, The Passenger.

Soon this quality of avatar will be walking around in Second Life.



SOURCE  Chris Jones

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 Benchtop Humans  

Scientists are reporting significant progress toward creating "homo minutus" -- a benchtop human. Researchers have successfully developed and analyzed a liver human organ construct that responds to exposure to a toxic chemical much like a real liver.

Creating surrogate human organs, coupled with insights from highly sensitive mass spectrometry technologies, a new project is on the brink of revolutionizing the way we screen new drugs and toxic agents.

ATHENA, the Advanced Tissue-engineered Human Ectypal Network Analyzer project team, is developing four human organ constructs – liver, heart, lung and kidney – that are based on a significantly miniaturized platform. Each organ component will be about the size of a smartphone screen, and the whole ATHENA “body” of interconnected organs would fit neatly on a desk.

“By developing this ‘homo minutus,’ we are stepping beyond the need for animal or Petri dish testing: There are huge benefits in developing drug and toxicity analysis systems that can mimic the response of actual human organs,” said Rashi Iyer, a senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the lead laboratory on the five-year, $19 million multi-institutional effort. The project is supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).

"By developing this ‘homo minutus,’ we are stepping beyond the need for animal or Petri dish testing: There are huge benefits in developing drug and toxicity analysis systems that can mimic the response of actual human organs."

“By creating a holistic dynamic system that more realistically mimics the human physiological environment than static human cells in a dish, we can understand chemical effects on human organs as never before,” she said. “The ultimate goal is to build a lung that breathes, a heart that pumps, a liver that metabolizes and a kidney that excretes -– all connected by a tubing infrastructure much akin to the way blood vessels connect our organs. While some skeptics might believe that this is a utopian dream,” she said, “the team is confident that this is indeed achievable.”

Some 40 percent of pharmaceuticals fail their clinical trials, Iyer noted, and there are thousands of chemicals whose effects on humans are simply unknown. Providing a realistic, cost-effective and rapid screening system such as ATHENA with high-throughput capabilities could provide major benefits to the medical field, screening more accurately and offering a greater chance of clinical trial success.

The achievement is the first result from a five-year, $19 million multi­ institutional effort led by Iyer, and John Wikswo, the Gordon A. Cain University Professor and Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education (VIIBRE) at Vanderbilt University.

The project is developing four interconnected human organ constructs -- liver, heart, lung and kidney -- that are based on a highly miniaturized platform nicknamed ATHENA (Advanced Tissue-engineered Human Ectypal Network Analyzer). The project is supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Similar programs to create smaller, so-called organs-on-chips are underway at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Institutes of Health.

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"The original impetus for this research comes from the problems we are having in developing new drugs," said Wikswo. "A number of promising new drugs that looked good in conventional cell culture and animal trials have failed when they were tested in humans, many due to toxic effects. That represents more than $1 billion in effort down the drain. Our current process of testing first in cell lines on plastic and then in mice, rats and other animals simply isn't working.''

In recent years, a cadre of scientists and clinicians around the world has begun to develop more relevant and advanced laboratory tests for drug efficacy and toxicity: small bioreactors that can form human organ structures and are equipped with sensors to monitor organ health.

Ultimately, the goal is to connect the individual organ modules chemically in a fashion that mimics the way the organs are connected in the body, via a blood surrogate. The ATHENA researchers hope that this ''homo minutus," with its ability to simulate the spatial and functional complexity of human organs, will prove to be a more accurate way of screening new drugs for potency and potential side-effects than current methods.

Devices of this type could also be extremely useful in the field of toxicology. Of the tens of thousands of chemical compounds being used routinely in commerce today, only a small fraction has been tested for toxicity. And even those have been examined only for acute toxicity, not for sub-lethal or chronic effects, because of the expense and time required by such tests. Human organ construct/organ-on-a-chip technology could make this process substantially cheaper and faster.

According to Iyer, this rich level of detail confirms that the ATHENA organ platform coupled with mass spectrometry technology can provide a more sensitive and effective method for screening both new drugs and toxic agents than is available today.

The team plans on hooking up their liver device to the Harvard heart this winter. They expect to add the lung construct being developed at Los Alamos next year and the UCSF/Vanderbilt kidney the year after.


SOURCE  Los Alamos National Laboratory

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 Avatar Research  

Researchers from the Center for Neuroprosthetics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland, show that people can be "tricked" into feeling that an image of a human figure -- an "avatar" -- is their own body.

Researchers from the Center for Neuroprosthetics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland, show that people can be "tricked" into feeling that an image of a human figure -- an "avatar" -- is their own body.

The study is published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Twenty-two volunteers underwent a Full Body Illusion when they were stroked with a robotic device system while they watched an avatar being stroked in the same spot. The study is the first to demonstrate that Full Body Illusions can be accompanied by changes in body temperature.

Participants wore a 3D high-resolution head-mounted display to view the avatar from behind. They were then subjected to 40 seconds of stroking by a robot, on either their left or right back or on their left or right leg. Meanwhile, they were shown a red dot that moved synchronously on the same regions of the avatar (see image below).

Image Source: Roy Salomon et al (2013) Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience

After the stroking, the participants were prompted to imagine dropping a ball and to signal the moment when they felt that the ball would hit the floor. This allowed the researchers to objectively measure where the participants perceived their body to be.

The volunteers were asked questions about how much they identified with the avatar and where they felt the stroking originated from. Furthermore, to test for physiological changes during the illusion, the participants' skin temperature was measured on four locations on the back and legs across 20 time points.

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Results showed that stroking the same body part simultaneously on the real body and the avatar induced a Full Body Illusion. The volunteers were confused as to where their body was and they partly identified with the avatar. More than 70% of participants felt that the touch they had felt on their body was derived from the stroking seen on the avatar.

Data revealed a continuous widespread decrease in skin temperature that was not specific to the site of measurement and showed similar effects in all locations. The changes in body temperature "were highly significant, but very small," write the authors in the study, adding that the decrease was in the range of 0.006-0.014 degrees Celsius.

The recorded temperature change was smaller than an earlier study found (0.24 degrees Celsius) that looked at fluctuations during rubber hand illusion, probably because the latter used a hand-held thermometer over longer periods and different regions of the body, the authors explain.

"When the brain is confronted with a multisensory conflict, such as that produced by the Full Body Illusion, the way we perceive our real body changes. This causes a decrease in our body temperature, " says Dr. Roy Salomon, a postdoctoral fellow at the EPFL and the lead author of the study.

The scientists also say that the field of cognitive neuroprosthetics carries great promise for new prosthetics that are based on a scientific understanding of the link between body and mind.

"This study helps us to understand the brain mechanisms that underlie the bodily aspects of consciousness and idea of 'self'. It may contribute to the design of novel prosthetic devices and treatment of pain, for example, after stroke, amputation, or tetraplegia," says Prof. Olaf Blanke, director of the newly founded Center for Neuroprosthetics.

"This type of research may also help to understand and treat psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and depression. We hope that by identifying the mechanisms involved in these processes and how they are altered in psychosis we can help these patients," adds Dr. Salomon.



SOURCE  Science Daily
Images: Roy Salomon et al (2013) Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience

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