Artificial Intelligence  

The American Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has recently set up a multi-million dollar initiative aimed at developing brain-inspired computing base principles so it can better understand the challenges and potential opportunities for developing next-generation computer systems.

Harvard University is primed to develop new artificial intelligence systems that work faster, smarter and perhaps better than the human brain. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has awarded $28 million to fund this project. The work will also further the overall goals of President Obama's BRAIN Initiative, which aims to improve the understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat neuropathological disorders like Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, autism and epilepsy.

IARPA is tasked with figuring out why our brains are so good at learning, and then translate their findings into the design of machine learning systems that can interpret, analyze, and learn information as successfully as humans. The researchers will record activity in the brain’s visual cortex in unprecedented detail, mapping the connectome at a scale never before attempted. They will then reverse-engineer the neural map data in silico and with algorithms inspired by their findings.

"As we figure out the fundamental principles governing how the brain learns, it’s not hard to imagine that we’ll eventually be able to design computer systems that can match, or even outperform, humans."

Researchers will then record brain activity, particularly activity in the visual cortex, in a fashion never done before. They will map "connections at a scale never before attempted" and reverse-engineer the data to create better computer algorithms.

“This is a moonshot challenge, akin to the Human Genome Project in scope,” said project leader David Cox, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology and computer science. “The scientific value of recording the activity of so many neurons and mapping their connections alone is enormous, but that is only the first half of the project. As we figure out the fundamental principles governing how the brain learns, it’s not hard to imagine that we’ll eventually be able to design computer systems that can match, or even outperform, humans.”

This ambitious project will be initiated in Cox’s laboratory, where they will train rats to visually recognize different items on a computer and then record activity inside the visual cortex. A portion of the rat’s brain will then be studied at the lab of project member Jeff Lichtman, where it will be sliced into ultra-thin pieces and imaged.

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“This is an amazing opportunity to see all the intricate details of a full piece of cerebral cortex,” says Lichtman. “We are very excited to get started but have no illusions that this will be easy.”

It is expected that the rat brains alone will generate over a petabyte of data, which is equal to around 1.6 million CDs of information. The data will also be reconstructed with algorithms recognizing and reconstructing the synapses and connections in a three dimensional interactive environment.

Afterwards, it is expected that the biologically-inspired computer algorithms realized from the project will outperform current computer systems in their ability to recognize patterns and make inferences from limited data inputs. Among other things, this research could improve the performance of computer vision systems that can help robots see and navigate through new environments, read MRI images, driving cars and ultimately, just about any other cognitive task we human do.

“We have a huge task ahead of us in this project, but at the end of the day, this research will help us understand what is special about our brains,” Cox said. “One of the most exciting things about this project is that we are working on one of the great remaining achievements for human knowledge — understanding how the brain works at a fundamental level.”

SOURCE  Harvard Gazette

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 Neuroscience  

Scientists are linking genetics and connectomics big data to target the conditions affecting various neurological conditions like Alzheimer's disease, depression and autism.  The ENIGMA project has released their recent findings.

The largest collaborative study of the brain to date has announced results. Researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) led a global consortium of 190 institutions to identify eight common genetic mutations that appear to age the brain an average of three years. The discovery could lead to targeted therapies and interventions for Alzheimer’s disease, autism and other neurological conditions.

An international team of roughly 300 scientists known as the Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta Analysis (ENIGMA) Network pooled brain scans and genetic data worldwide to pinpoint genes that enhance or break down key brain regions in people from 33 countries. This is the first high-profile study since the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched its Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) centers of excellence in 2014.

"ENIGMA’s scientists screen brain scans and genomes worldwide for factors that help or harm the brain — this crowd-sourcing and sheer wealth of data gives us the power to crack the brain’s genetic code."

The research was published in the journal Nature.

“ENIGMA’s scientists screen brain scans and genomes worldwide for factors that help or harm the brain — this crowd-sourcing and sheer wealth of data gives us the power to crack the brain’s genetic code,” said Paul Thompson, Ph.D., Keck School of Medicine of USC professor and principal investigator of ENIGMA.

“Our global team discovered eight genes that may erode or boost brain tissue in people worldwide. Any change in those genes appears to alter your mental bank account or brain reserve by 2 or 3 percent. The discovery will guide research into more personalized medical treatments for Alzheimer’s, autism, depression and other disorders.”

The study could help identify people who would most benefit from new drugs designed to save brain cells, but more research is necessary to determine if the genetic mutations are implicated in disease.

Adolescents with autism showed an altered pattern of brain development. Image Source -  USC Imaging Genetics Center

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The ENIGMA researchers screened millions of “spelling differences” in the genetic code to see which ones affected the size of key parts of the brain in magnetic resonance images (MRIs) from 30,717 individuals. The MRI analysis focused on genetic data from seven regions of the brain that coordinate movement, learning, memory and motivation.

"We found that healthy individuals who carry a gene variation linked to an increased risk of autism have structural differences in their brains that may help explain how the gene affects brain function and increases vulnerability for autism," the team writes on the USC Imaging Genetics Center website, for instance.

The group identified eight genetic variants associated with decreased brain volume, several found in over one-fifth of the world’s population.  People who carry one of those eight mutations had, on average, smaller brain regions than brains without a mutation but of comparable age; some of the genes are implicated in cancer and mental illness.

Recently, the NIH invested nearly $32 million in its Big Data Initiative, creating 12 research hubs across the United States to improve the utility of biomedical data. USC’s two BD2K centers of excellence, including ENIGMA, were awarded a total of $23 million over four years.

“The ENIGMA Center’s work uses vast datasets as engines of biomedical discovery; it shows how each individual’s genetic blueprint shapes the human brain,” said Philip Bourne, Ph.D., associate director for data science at the NIH. “This ‘Big Data’ alliance shows what the NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Program envisions achieving with our 12 Centers of Excellence for Big Data Computing.”


SOURCE  USC

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 Brain Preservation  

Dr. Ken Hayworth – a proponent of the idea of brain preservation – wants to move the debate around brain preservation beyond ideology and towards measurable scientific milestones.

Would you have your brain preserved? Do you believe your brain is the essence of you? To Dr. Ken Hayworth, the answer is an emphatic, “Yes.” He is currently developing machines and techniques to map brain tissue at the nanometer scale - the key to encoding our individual identities.

“I wish it were possible, from this instance, to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, the being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country. But since, in all probability, we live in an age too early, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection, I must, for the present, content myself with the treat…of the resurrection of a fowl or a turkey-cock.”

- Ben Franklin, Observations on the Generally Prevailing Doctrines on Life and Death

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Often individuals’ opinions on the quality of current preservation methods are suspiciously well aligned with whether or not they think the whole ‘life after death’ thing sounds like a good idea. Is the field legitimate science, pseudo-science, or the domain of hucksters? Hayworth – a proponent of the idea of brain preservation – wants to move the debate around brain preservation beyond ideology and towards measurable scientific milestones.

A self-described transhumanist and President of the Brain Preservation Foundation, Hayworth’s goal is to perfect existing preservation techniques, like cryonics, as well as explore and push evolving opportunities to effect a change on the status quo.

"I really expect that brain preservation is a solvable problem, and it will be solved within the next decade," states Hayworth.  Also, he believes that more and more neuroscience evidence will convince skeptics, that the brain, and the billions of neurosynaptic connections—the connectome—is who we really are.

"I really expect that brain preservation is a solvable problem, and it will be solved within the next decade."

Currently there is no brain preservation option that offers systematic, scientific evidence as to how much human brain tissue is actually preserved when undergoing today’s experimental preservation methods.

Hayworth believes we can achieve his vision of preserving an entire human brain at an accepted and proven standard within the next decade. If Hayworth is right, is there a countdown to immortality?

The film above, is the first short film in  Ken Hayworth series on the Galactic Public Archives YouTube channel.

SOURCE  Galactic Public Archives

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 Connectomics  

Currently there are two methods on the table for preserving a brain so that it may be reanimated, or uploaded in the future. Alcor has been cryopreserving people for 40 years, while the techniques for bringing back frozen flesh, and more importantly neural pathways, are slowly developed. Now connectomics research has introduced chemical brain preservation as a method, albeit destructive, that may someday allow a brain to be brought back to 'life'.

S ebastian Seung may seem like an unlikely person to visit and talk at the Alcor Conference.  The computational neuroscientist, and author of Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, did just that though last year. Specifically, Seung addressed some of the points and criticisms of the last two chapters of the book, which explore more of the transhumanist areas of connectomics research, including how cryonics may not save a person's brain (see video above).

Advances in neuroscience today strongly suggest that appropriately preserved brains will contain our memories, identity, and consciousness, and therefore preservation technology, when it arrives, will make such brains available for future reading of memories, or full revival if desired.

According to Seung, if the connectome is to be preserved, with the gossamer thin strands of neural connnections, that measure end-to-end into the millions of miles, cryopreservation will not work. Seung in his talk does not ever say these words exactly, but does ask the audience to consider what he is saying, by going through the steps that he, and other connectomics researchers like Ken Hayworth use.

Image Source: Brain Preservation Foundation

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Seung and Hayworth use the technology of chemical brain preservation to explore connectomes. Unlike the freezing method of cyronics used at Alcor, chemical brain preservation essentially kills the cells it preserves. Shortly before or moments after death, a scientists will start the process of emergency glutaraldehyde perfusion (EGP) for protein fixation (a kind of advanced embalming process).  

"The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body," says Hayworth.

At Alcor, many of the members want eventually to return to life in their own bodies, and so the methods of freezing the body (or just the head) at death makes sense.  They do not necessarily want to return as a 'brain in a box' upload, that seems to be the de facto outcome of the chemical brain preservation route.

In another talk at the same conference, Twenty-First Century Medicine cryobiologist Gregory Fahy took aim at the chemical brain preservation researchers (see image below).  Showing his work on advancing cryonics, Fahy says:

All of a sudden something scary happens.  People like Ken Hayworth come along and Sebastian Seung and John Smart wondering if maybe cryopreservation is all wrong - it's not the right way to go at all.  It would be much better too have your brain perfused with gluteraldehyde, then embedded in plastic and then cut into tiny little pieces and bombarded with electron beams.  I don't know but, I have some reservations about my brain being destroyed as a way of preserving it.

Fahy is counting on future nanomedicine to reanimate cryopreserved people.  He prefers what he calls the 'classical' cryopreservation approach.

Image Source: Anders Sandberg

To help decide whether cryonics or chemical brain preservation (or both, or neither) is a feasible method for an eventual uploading/immortality technology, Seung is a judge for the Brain Preservation Foundation's prize.  The Brain Preservation Foundation was started by Hayworth as an organization to advance the use and techniques of chemical brain preservation and long term storage.  The Prize seeks the development of an inexpensive and reliable hospital surgical procedure which verifiably preserves the structural connectivity of 99.9% of the synapses in a human brain if administered rapidly after biological death.

There are currently two competitors for the Brain Preservation Foundation prize.

Seung undoubtedly retains a lingering fascination with the possibility of an intersection between connectomics and transhumanism. At a TED talk he gave, he commented that connectomics might eventually put to the test whether a technology like cryonics will eventually be feasible.  



SOURCE  Alcor Cryonics

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 Connectomics  

For the field of connectomics, the micro-scale the brain is a mess; a thick tangle of nerve cells connected at synapses. Mapping just a tiny portion of this mess, a few hundred cells, is a huge challenge. But seeing exactly how brain cells are wired together is giving researchers new insights into brain function.

Researchers working out the brain connectomics of fruitflies and mouse retinas have mapped the forest of interconnections and neuronal activity of the animals' visual networks.

The scientists, whose work is published in three separate studies in Nature, have also created three-dimensional reconstructions, shown in the video above.

Image Source: Kevin Briggman

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All three studies interrogate parts of the central nervous system located in the eyes. In one, Moritz Helmstaedter, a neurobiologist at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany, and his collaborators created a complete 3D map of a 950-cell section of a mouse retina, including the interconnections among those neuronal cells. To do so, the team tapped into the help of more than 200 students, who collectively spent more than 20,000 hours processing the images.

The two other studies investigated how the retinas of the fruitfly (Drosophila melanogaster) detect motion. Shin-ya Takemura, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia, and his collaborators mapped four neuronal circuits associated with motion perception and found that each is wired for detecting motion in a particular direction — up, down, left or right.

In the third study, Matthew Maisak, a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, and his colleagues mapped the same four cellular networks and tagged the cells of each with protein markers that fluoresce in red, green, blue or yellow in response to stimulation with light3.

Although the three studies looked at tiny bits of neuronal networks in animal retinas, researchers hope that by improving the techniques they will be able some day to map the full sets of connections, or connectomes, of entire brains — including human ones.

The video above mentions that mapping the mouse retina connectome is being crowd-sourced in an effort to help identify connections that the artificial intelligence systems being used cannot sort out.  To take part in this research, visit the EyeWire website.

Such technology, according to scientists like Ken Hayworth, may one day even allow us to recreate our neural maps digitally and upload our brains.



SOURCE  Nature

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 Connectomics  

David Dalrymple's work on Project NEMALOAD, that intends to create a fully realized uploaded version of a nematode worm based on its connectome has yielded a new an app that displays video renderings of the worms' neural activity, where each frame can be rotated and manipulated in 3D.

David Dalrymple is an independent scientist, funded by the Thiel Foundation studying the neurology of the nematode worm C. Elegans, an important model organism in genetics and neuroscience.

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Dalrymple's work is part of Project NEMALOAD, which intends to create a fully realized uploaded version of a nematode worm based on its connectome.

According to the project's website:

C. elegans is a simple-minded animal: it has exactly 302 neurons (compare that to a human's roughly 100 billion). The pattern of connections between these neurons was painstakingly mapped out decades ago using electron microscopy, but it turns out that knowledge of the connections is not sufficient to understand (or even replicate) the information processor they represent. For example, some connections are inhibitory while others are excitatory, but this map doesn't say which is which. 

In order to learn how one neuron affects another, we need to see what happens when the first neuron is activated. NEMALOAD (“nematode upload”) is a project to integrate a number of recent technologies that should make this feasible, at least in C. elegans, and using this capability to replicate the information processing structure that governs the worm's behavior in a digital model.

In the video above, he demos Nemashow, an app built with Meteor and WebGL.

The app displays video renderings of the worms' neural activity, where each frame can be rotated and manipulated in 3D.



SOURCE  MeteorVideos, Image Project OpenWorm

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 Brain Uploading  

Adam Ford recently uploaded an in depth interview in two parts with Dr. Ken Hayworth. Hayworth is the connectomics pioneer behind the innovative mouse brain connectome observatory. He is also the founding president of the Brain Preservation Foundation.

Recently Adam Ford uploaded an in depth interview in two parts with Dr. Ken Hayworth.  Hayworth is the connectomics pioneer behind the innovative mouse brain connectome observatory.  He is also the founding president of the Brain Preservation Foundation.

Currently, Hayworth is continuing his neuroscience research as a senior scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus.

Neuroscientists today can preserve small volumes of animal brain tissue immediately after death with incredible precision -- the features and structure of every synapse within these volumes is well-protected down to the nanometer scale, using an inexpensive, room-temperature process of chemical fixation and plastic embedding, or "plastination."

The image above is an example of plastination and local circuit tracing, occurring in leading neuroscience labs around the world today. This work immediately raises the question:

"Can the standard chemical fixation and plastic embedding technique used for electron microscopic investigation of brain circuitry be adapted to preserve the synaptic connectivity of an entire human brain?"

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According to Hayworth, This is a well-defined scientific question, and we now have the tools necessary to answer this question definitively.  Moreover, his Brain Preservation Foundation has put up a $100,000 prize for the technology that is able to make this work.

"The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body," says Hayworth.

Hayworth proposes a protocol where when a patent in hospital has run out of medican options, he or she will be placed under anesthesia, then a cocktail of toxic chemicals will be perfused through their vascular system, fixing every protein and lipid in their brain into place, preventing any decay, and causing instantaneous death.  

This method of plastination differs from the cryonics procedure offered by organizations such as Alcor, but Hayworth does not suggest at this stage one method is head and shoulders above the other.  "Competition in science is healthy," he says.

After death through the plastination process, the patient's brain will be injected with heavy-metal staining solutions to make the cell membranes visible under a microscope. All of the water will then be drained from his brain and spinal cord, replaced by pure plastic resin.

With this method, every neuron and synapse in his central nervous system will be protected down to the nanometer level, Hayworth says, “the most perfectly preserved fossil imaginable.”

Using a ultramicrotome, a plastic-embedded preserved brain will eventually be cut into strips, and then imaged in an electron microscope. The physical brain can then be destroyed, but in its place will be a precise map of the patient's connectome.

Hayworth states that this method, unlike the potential of cryonics will mean that the uploaded brain will not be re-established in the patient's own body (presumably cleared of all disease and aging signs).  Rather, he suggests that the process will be better suited for robotic replacement of the body, or a substate independant mind.  

In 100 years or so, Hayworth suggests, scientists will be able to determine the function of each neuron and synapse and build a complete computer simulation of the mind bases on the wiring diagram connectome collected. 

“This isn’t cryonics, where maybe you have a .001 percent chance of surviving,” he said. “We’ve got a good scientific case for brain preservation and mind uploading.”

In the lenghty interview embedded below, Ford and Hayworth also cover the topics of artificial intelligence, the Singularity, President Obama's BRAIN project, the work of Henry Markram and other aspects of mind uploading.  

SOURCE  Adam Ford

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Professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT Sebastian Seung discusses how the study of "connectomes", a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain, can help turn science fiction into reality. Seung proposes that through the study of the connectome we can test whether ideas such as freezing ourselves or uploading our brains on to computers are even possible.

Seung has found what he calls the nexus of nature and nurture: the "Connectome", or the network of connections between neurons in the human brain. He will take you inside his ambitious quest to model the Connectome, which, if successful, would uncover the basis of personality, intelligence, memory and disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

Dr. Seung is Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Adjunct Assistant Neurobiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. He studied theoretical physics with David Nelson at Harvard University, and completed postdoctoral training with Haim Sompolinsky at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before joining the MIT faculty, he was a member of the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Laboratories. Dr. Seung has been a Sloan Research Fellow, a Packard Fellow, and a McKnight Scholar. 

He is also author of the recent book, Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, and creator of the Eyewire project.  McGill University Professor of Psychology and Neurosciences Daniel Levitin wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Connectome is "the best lay book on brain science I've ever read."

View the complete video at: http://fora.tv/2012/02/13/Sebastian_Seung_Connectome 

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