A Digital Life

New systems may allow people to record everything they see and hear--and even things they cannot sense--and to store all these data in a personal digital archive
By Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell

I’ve been reading and hearing about the possibility of recording your entire life. Every second, every word and every image. It just takes cheap cameras (still and video), microphones, storage, and most importantly, software. Software is the critical piece of the pie to actually make use of the mountains of data that would be captured. Well, I had no idea these guys over at Microsoft have been working on this for years. How nice will it be to have a small window pop up in your eye glasses giving you the name, some brief summary points from past conversations (kids, alma matter, hobbies, etc) of the “old friend” you just bumped into (at a grocery store, networking event, etc.)? How about all the medical insights of continually monitored patients and the physiological impacts of various environments and stimuli? It was great to find a succinct overview of the potential of this idea from Scientific American. Check it out!

Jeff Hawkins hacks the human brain

"The creator of the PalmPilot and the Treo isn't just making another gadget. He's attempting to fuse silicon and gray matter to produce the ultimate intelligent machine."

Here’s an interesting article I read today. From what I know, I agree that Numata seems quite aggressive. The human brain has many different regions which all work together in a myriad of ways. The neocortex is agreeably a very complex portion. I can’t help but wonder if simulating just this one region, they’re going to be missing a variety of important subparts of the brain that are integral to the functioning of the neocortex. I like the passion and the efforts and I can see that there are real applications for their efforts. Whether or not it’s doing what the neocortex is doing, their product sounds like a flexible and relatively easy way to program genetic algorithms. This is weak AI – even though the article kind of hints towards it becoming strong AI. It looks like a way to expand weak AI’s reach into new territory, so it sounds great to me! Pretty cool to see such a successful group of people putting real time, money and energy into such a product!

Mimicking how the brain recognizes street scenes

I've always enjoyed seeing interdisciplinary discoveries. When I was getting my undergraduate degree, they were just starting to link different disciplines together in the same course. Two classes that I took that weren't linked, but I took in the same quarter and were Physical Psychology and Epistemology. I was often utilizing information from Physical Psychology in the Epistemology class. In the end, it I suppose I just prolonged some discussions of how we get information from our senses as I could actually describe it in some detail, but fascinating as it was, this article's discovery from crossing neuroscience and computer science is exciting. I wander if these guys are going to be involved in the latest DARPA Grand Challenge (I noticed this research was practically funded by DARPA). This is almost pseudo reverse engineering of the brain - well it actually is, but one a rudimentary level.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-02/mifb-mht020607.php