Conference on Brain Informatics (BI)

I frequently receive conference announcements in my in-box and rarely do they inspire me much at all, but the announcement for a conference on "Brain Informatics" certainly caught my attention. The announcement for "2010 International Conference on Brain Informatics (BI 2010)" or "Brain Informatics 2010" tells us that:

Brain Informatics (BI) has recently emerged as an interdisciplinary research field that focuses on studying the mechanisms underlying the human information processing system (HIPS). It investigates the essential functions of the brain, ranging from perception to thinking, and encompassing such areas as multi-perception, attention, memory, language, computation, heuristic search, reasoning, planning, decision-making, problem-solving, learning, discovery, and creativity. The goal of BI is to develop and demonstrate a systematic approach to achieving an integrated understanding of both macroscopic and microscopic level working principles of the brain, by means of experimental, computational, and cognitive neuroscience studies, as well as utilizing advanced Web Intelligence (WI) centric information technologies.

It goes on to say that:

BI represents a potentially revolutionary shift in the way that research is undertaken. It attempts to capture new forms of collaborative and interdisciplinary work. In this vision, new kinds of BI methods and global research communities will emerge, through infrastructure on the wisdom Web and knowledge grids that enables high speed and distributed, large-scale analysis and computations, and radically new ways of sharing data/knowledge.

And:

Brain Informatics 2010 provides a leading international forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields, such as computer science, information technology, artificial intelligence, Web intelligence, cognitive science, neuroscience, medical science, life science, economics, data mining, data and knowledge engineering, intelligent agent technology, human computer interation, complex systems, and system science, to explore the main research problems in BI lie in the interplay between the studies of human brain and the research of informatics. On the one hand, one models and characterizes the functions of the human brain based on the notions of information processing systems. WI centric information technologies are applied to support brain science studies. For instance, the wisdom Web and knowledge grids enable high-speed, large-scale analysis, simulation, and computation as well as new ways of sharing research data and scientific discoveries. On the other hand, informatics-enabled brain studies, e.g., based on fMRI, EEG, MEG significantly broaden the spectrum of theories and models of brain sciences and offer new insights into the development of human-level intelligence on the wisdom Web and knowledge grids.

The announcement provides another summary for "Brain Informatics (BI)":

Brain Informatics (BI) is an emerging interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research field that focuses on studying the mechanisms underlying the human information  processing system (HIPS). BI investigates the essential functions of the brain, ranging from perception to thinking, and encompassing such areas as multi-perception, attention, memory, language, computation, heuristic search, reasoning, planning, decision-making, problem-solving, learning, discovery, and creativity.  One goal of BI research is to develop and demonstrate a systematic approach to an integrated understanding of macroscopic and microscopic level working principles of the brain, by means of experimental, computational, and cognitive neuroscience studies, as well as utilizing advanced Web Intelligence (WI) centric information technologies.  Another goal is to promote new forms of collaborative and interdisciplinary work.  New kinds of BI methods and global research communities will emerge, through infrastructure on the wisdom Web and knowledge grids that enables high speed and distributed, large-scale analysis and computations, and radically new ways of data/knowledge sharing.

Conference topics include:

• Thinking and perception-centric investigations of HIPS:
• Human reasoning mechanisms (e.g., principles of human deductive/inductive reasoning, common-sense reasoning, decision making, and problem solving)
• Human learning mechanisms (e.g., stability, personalized user/student models)
• Emotion, heuristic search, information granularity, and autonomy related issues in human reasoning and problem solving
• Human higher cognitive functions and their relationships
• Human multi-perception mechanisms and visual, auditory, and tactile information processing
• Methodologies for systematic design of cognitive experiments
• Investigating spatiotemporal characteristics and flow in HIPS and the related neural structures and neurobiological process
• Cognitive architectures; their relations to fMRI/EEG/MEG
• HIPS meets complex systems
• Modeling brain information processing mechanisms (e.g., neuro-mechanism, mathematical, cognitive and computational models of HIPS).
• Information technologies for the management and use of brain data:
• Human brain data collection, pre-processing, management, and analysis
• Databasing the brain and constructing data brain models
• Data brain modeling and formal conceptual models of human brain data
• Multi-media brain data mining and reasoning
• Multi-aspect analysis in fMRI/EEG/MEG activations
• Simulating spatiotemporal characteristics and flow in HIPS
• Developing brain data grids and brain research support portals
• Knowledge representation and discovery in neuroimaging
• Multimodal information fusion for brain image interpretation
• Statistical analysis and pattern recognition in neuroimaging
• Applications
• Neuro-economics and neuro-marketing
• Brain-Computer-Interface (BCI)
• Brain/Cognition inspired artificial systems
• Wisdom Web systems based on new cognitive and computational models
• MCI and AD diagnosis
• e-Science and e-Medicine

-- Jack Krupansky

 

Laptop overheating problems and solution - Belkin Laptop Cooling Stand

For future reference, if you ever run into laptop overheating problems and don't have a good solution, the solution that has worked for me with my Toshiba notebook PC is the Belkin Laptop Cooling Stand. I bought mine for $29 at BestBuy, but you can get it for $19 on Amazon:

(Note: The Amazon product title refers to it as a "Belkin F5L001 Laptop Cooling Pad", but the detailed description makes clear that it is a "Cooling Stand", meaning mainly that it does have a powerful, built-in, USB-powered fan.)

It adds space under your laptop, has a big cooling fan (USB-powered), and gives your laptop a more ergonomic angle (two choices). It is noisier than an overheating laptop, but it works a lot better than an overheated laptop.

It keeps most of the bottom of the laptop cool to the touch, which is as much as you could hope for. It virtually eliminates the need for the fan inside your notebook computer to run at all.

I almost tried a "cooling pad", but I went for broke to solve my problem. A cooling pad may be fine for some problems and may be better for people who travel a lot and do not want the bulky "stand".

Incidentally, when I traveled last time I had no overheating problem with my notebook PC on the hotel desk. Maybe the hard Formica and construction of the desk and better air flow in the hotel room avoided the problem. So, you may not need the cooling stand when you go on the road even if you need it in your home "office."

For reference, some coming symptoms of laptop overheating:

• Keyboard "dies"
• Hard drive "dies"
• Some keyboard keys "die" or there are "phantom" repeating keystrokes.
• System slows down and maybe the screen dims

-- Jack Krupansky

Philosophy and Ethics of Social Reality

I just ran across an interesting conference announcement, SOCREAL 2010: Second International Workshop on Philosophy and Ethics of Social Reality. The conference summary is:

In the past two decades, a number of logics and game theoretical analyses have been proposed and combined to model various aspects of social interaction among agents including individual agents, organizations, and individuals representing organizations. The aim of SOCREAL Workshop is to bring together researchers working on diverse aspects of such interaction in logic, philosophy, ethics, computer science, cognitive science and related fields in order to share issues, ideas, techniques, and results.

Topics will include:

• Language (or communication) as part of social reality
• Speech acts (or communicative acts) as what shape social reality
• Moral commitments (and conflicts) in social interaction
• Logic and game theory as tools for studying social reality
• (Organized) collective agency
• Norms and normative systems
• Social institutional facts and their dynamics

From my own perspective, presently, software agents operate at a rather primitive level with little more than basic data transfer and simple control, but eventually software agents will evolve into intelligent agents whose activity is more in the line of social behavior, including ethics and the behavior of groups and even organizations and institutions of software agents. And, of course, software agents are acting as agents for other entities, whether computational, or human. There certainly is a lot of ground to be broken. It is at least heartening that people are beginning to scratch the surface of the potential for social reality of computational entities.

Eventually, somebody will realize that these social agents are communicating in a language and that language has semantics and that there is a potential for a great semantic abyss between the various communities of social agents, as well as a vast semantic abyss between these computational agents and their real world "masters".

Great challenges and great opportunities.

-- Jack Krupansky

Quantum artificial life

Just a note to myself to eventually look into the concept of quantum artificial life. Not sure what it really is. Doesn't even have a Wikipedia page yet. And a Google search yields little.

Assuming that it really does have some basis in quantum mechanics, two questions pop up:

1. How can you model and "work" with a system at such a small scale that its characteristics are indeterminate.
2. In theory, scaling up a quantum-scale system to a macro-scale system means that we flip from that absolute indeterminism to a relative statistical determinism.

Hmmm...

-- Jack Krupansky

Interesting conference workshop on Complexity, Evolution, and Emergent Intelligence

I was just reading the call for papers announcement for a workshop entitled "Workshop on Complexity, Evolution and Emergent Intelligence" at the AI*IA 09 Eleventh Conference of the Italian Association of Artificial Intelligence scheduled on December 12, 2009 in Reggio Emilia, Italy which covers a variety of topics related to complex systems and "aims at bringing together scientists who work from different perspectives, from basic science to applications, on the common theme of systems composed by many components that interact non-linearly."

The focus is on complex systems which "very often exhibit interesting features, as self-organisation, robustness, surprising collective processes and occasionally intelligence."

A workshop goal is to achieve closer interactions between the communities of Complex Systems Science (CSS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI):

Recent developments -- for example in the context of agent-based modelling, distributed and/or evolutionary computation -- represent new opportunities for further exploring and strengthening these scientific interactions and connections.

The workshop will pay close attention to the combination of intelligence and complex interactions:

As already suggested, the contemporary presence of intelligence and complex interactions may not be casual but, instead, able to disclose deeper links between the two characteristics. Are there universal patterns of organization in complex systems, from pre-biotic replicators to evolved beings, to artificial objects? Do these structures allow effective computational processes to develop?

Key questions are how robust structures which develop in such systems are, how information is incorporated into these structures and how computation emerges. The study of complex systems is also interested in determining the contributions of selection, chance and self-organization to the functioning and evolution of complex structures.

Topics of interest for the workshop include:

• Agent based models
• Cellular automata
• Evolutionary computation
• Information processing
• Network properties
• Self-organisation, emergent behaviours
• Tangled hierarchies, description levels, reciprocal causality
• Adaptation/exaptation
• Evolution and co-evolution
• Robustness, criticality
• Pattern formation, pattern recognition, collective intelligence
• Non linear dynamics, edge of chaos
• The emergence of mind
• Bio-inspired methods

I am most intrigued with tangled hierarchies and the emergence of mind, but it is all quite fascinating stuff.

-- Jack Krupansky

One-way travel to Mars?

I noticed the intriguing Op-Ed article in The New York Times by Lawrence M. Krauss entitled "A One-Way Ticket to Mars" and was immediately reminded of similar thoughts I had and blogged about back on May 27, 2007 in a post about being a Mars colonist entitled "One-way trip to Mars".

I would definitely consider signing up for one-way travel to Mars to be a Mars colonist. I might want to wait a few more years before going, but nobody is going yet anyway.

Note that going one-way would not necessarily mean you could never come back, but simply that the return trip, if any, is completely decoupled from the outbound voyage. Some colonists might seek to return, but a majority would likely seek to stay on Mars.

Another note is that the somewhat weaker gravity would be a blessing to those of more advanced age (such as aging Baby Boomers.)

A final note is the prospect of children being born and raised on Mars.

And beyond a final note is the prospect of genetic engineering of humans to be able to survive in the weak atmosphere of Mars.

-- Jack Krupansky

The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine

There is an interesting article from Wired by Robert Capps entitled "The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine" which expresses a concept that I have believed in... forever. Actually, I haven't finished reading the article yet, but just the first page was "good enough" for me to judge that the author was talking about one of my core philosophies about technology, products, and services.

My own philosophy of "good enough" explains why I remain a diehard PC owner and user. Is the Mac better? Maybe, in some ways. Is the Mac superior enough to justify its price tag? To me: No way. To put it simply: To me, the PC is good enough.

To me, good enough is... good enough. Why pay extra for what you do not really need?

-- Jack Krupansky

More thoughts on the book: Wired for Thought by Jeffrey Stibel

Previously, I gave a rather lackluster mini-review of the new book Wired for Thought: How the Brain Is Shaping the Future of the Internet by Jeffrey M. Stibel which claims that "The Internet is more than just a series of interconnected computer networks: it's the first real replication of the human brain outside the human body", but I have had a few more thoughts, in particular related to the concept of a "collective consciousness."

My main regret is that I failed to note that the World Wide Web as a whole does to a fair extent represent a dynamic snapshot of the collective consciousness of the millions of people who use the Web. Blog posts and Twitter streams do in fact give a reasonably accurate sense of the topics that are at the front of our collective minds and the tip of our collective tongues.

The Web itself does not sense or have consciousness, but users using the Web as a wall to write on and read from can convey their thoughts and reactions through the Web.

But, I think that is about as far as I feel comfortable going on this idea of the Web being analogous to the human brain.

After all, this collective consciousness is not really a consciousness per se in the way the human brain has a consciousness. There is no single voice of the collective. There is no I. There is no sense of self.

We cannot have a true dialogue with the collective.

We cannot ask a question and get an answer.

The collective does not have a personality.

You cannot have a one-to-one or one-on-one interaction with the collective.

The collective never makes a decision.

The collective does not have a responsibility. Nor does it have any obligations.

The collective does not exhibit common sense.

Nonetheless, the book does contain some interesting insights and is well worth a browse even if you do not purchase it.

-- Jack Krupansky