How many time we have thought “it would be nice if I just think of calling my friend and ,voilà, my cell phone dials his number!”. May be not that but something equivalent: turning our thoughts into immediate action with no cumbersome interface.

Samsung is working on BCI to control a cell phone.

Well, progress in BCI, Brain Computer Interface, is now turning the question into “when will it be possible…”. Our wish, indeed, may be granted soon.

On the left a photo of a soft helmet being experimented by Samsung to pick up electrical signals generated by thoughts in our brain and decode them via a computer to generate commands to a cell phone.

Now, it is clear that I do not want to wear such a thing! But researchers are progressing in making such an helmet invisible, by replacing it with a chip that can be implanted under the scalp. That would solve the aesthetics issue but the whole thing is going to open up a can of worm!

Suppose we will come to a point that you can be implanted at very low cost and with no pain nor physical side effects a chip that can pick up your thoughts and send them to a computer (let’s assume the one in your cell phone) and therefore you, or may be not you but many people, will choose to have such an implant.

The possibility to connect at light speed thinking and acting may give a competitive advantage in many field and so one might suppose that over time a growing number of people will make BCI a mainstream reality.

What are the legal implication? This is what an article on Technology Review is wondering about.

Who is going to be accountable if something breaks down and you do not what you though but something different? Or, even more likely, you changed your mind a millisecond after having sent the command…? The delay between thinking and acting is saving our day many times over!

And, of course, this is just the beginning! What if we get hacked? Our thoughts gets stolen, made public?

The fact is we have been evolved through the eons within a very precise framework: the impossibility to know for sure what another person is thinking. And even if we might guess what is going on in another brain we do not know for sure what will be going on in the next second… This impossibility, or uncertainty, has shaped our behaviour and our social relations.

If this framework crumbles we find ourselves completely unprepared in a social sense. And this is the one that is most crucial to our life. Indeed it is ever more true that new solutions beget new problems!

Nature has kept evolving for at least 4 billion years on Earth, transforming random interactions into progressively more complex “random but probabilistically directed” interactions that all together create emerging behaviours that in turn increase probability and in a way decrease randomness.

The basic steering force in this evolution can be seen as Darwin said “the survival of the fittest” or as other biologists put it “the success of the most adaptable”. A physicist would probably say “the drive towards lower and more efficient power consumption against the second law of thermodynamics”.

Indeed, if we look at biological systems we see an amazing success in minimising the power requirements, from the flight control system of an insect that selectively activates just what’s needed in a specific moment to the automatic temperature control in termite nests.

A network of hundreds or thousands of dissociated mammalian cortical cells (neurons and glia) are cultured on a transparent multi-electrode array. Activity is recorded extracellularly to control the behavior of an artificial animal (the Animat) within a simulated environment. Sensory input to the Animat is translated into patterns of electrical stimuli sent back into the network. (Credit: Thomas B. Demarse et al./Autonomous Robots)

Engineers are trying to reduce as much as possible, nowadays, the power budget in their systems and the overall power budget in system aggregation. This latter is much more challenging since the aggregation results from a multitude of systems, each one optimised but those optimisations when aggregated do not necessarily result in an overall optimisation. We need to move from local optimisation to an overall optimisation and that requires that each individual system can evolve and adapt over time. A very big challenge indeed. So why not learn from Nature that had billion of years to perfect strategies and went through billions of missteps eventually coming to good solutions?

This is what many scientists are actually doing. More specifically, this post is originated by having read a news from the National Science Foundation reporting on the work of a team at the   Real Power and Intelligence Systems Laboratory at Clemson University.

This is a team of neuroscientists that have decided to approach the problem of controlling the complexity of electrical grids using live neurones grown in a culture dish. By leveraging the ability of neurones to process complex data (and understanding patterns) the neuroscientists hope to create a “smart grid”.

According to Venayagamoorthy, the team lead researcher:

“What we need is a system that can monitor, forecast, plan, learn, make decisions. Ultimately, what we need is a control system that is very brain-like. The brain is one of the most robust computational platforms that exists. As power-systems control becomes more and more complex, it makes sense to look to the brain as a model for how to deal with all of the complexity and the uncertainty that exists”.

Our understanding of “our” brain is still very crude, although we know so much more than just few years ago. In the next few years, within this decade, there is a strong consensus by scientists that we will be able to understand most of the fine mechanisms regulating the way our brain manipulate the information coming from our senses, compute it and store it generating thoughts, perceptions and emotion.

A memory implant to stimulate the brain for activating long term memory processes.

Through implants we will be able to detect what is going on and “help” the brain to process information. This clearly opens some very positive possibilities but it also brings us into unchartered worlds.

Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist working at the University of Southern California, is working on something that just few years ago classified him as a looney: helping the brain to convert short term memory into long term memory. All our experiences are temporarily stored in what is called a short term memory, short term because in the space of a few minutes, hours sometimes, it vanishes and we forget. That is, unless our brain has been able to move those memories into a different space (not a different “place”) aptly called “long term memory”. This is accomplished by the hippocampus an area on the lower part of our brain.
A person suffering from Alzheimer or who had a stroke affecting the hippocampus loses its capability of creating a long term memory, which means that he lives in the present, he has no “past”. A terrible situation if you think about it.

What Theodore has been working on has been trying to understand how memories are transformed from short to long term. He felt he understood a bit and then he moved on to experiment. He, and his team, developed a chip that can mimic the workings of neurones and then set up an implant (shown in the photo) to detect neuronal activity and to stimulate neurones.

He has proved that his mathematical model of what causes the transfer of a short term memory into a long term memory works well, and that was demonstrated by stimulating the neurones of rats and monkeys and showing that such a stimulation increases the capability to retain memories (i.e. they become long term memories).

In an interview, reported in the article linked to this post, Theodore says that what once was a pure, and unbelievable speculation, now is scientific work and the question is no longer if we will ever be able to increase our brain memory capabilities but it is about when we will succeed.

The first goal is to address the disabilities of those suffering from Alzheimer or to overcome the impairment provoked by a stroke. And again, it is no longer a matter of speculation but of making it happen soon.

Have you ever heard people saying: “a bulb light moment!”. You got cartoon showing the bulb shining light over your head and in Italy we go as far as saying that “a light has lighten up in my brain”.

Tiny LED on the tip af an optical fibre

Well, it appears that scientists have taken this slang for real and have been working to really light up the brain and to see what happens!

They discovered that neurones can be made sensitive to light, by manipulating the genes, in what is called optogenetics. By inserting an optical fibre in the brain of a rat whose neurones were conditioned to be sensitive to light, it was possible to influence, through light pulses, the reactions of neurones. They proved that light pulses stimulate neurones to produce dopamine and in turns this chemical changes the overall processing of neurones. In the experiment scientists stimulated the pleasure areas of the brain rat.

The optical fibre terminating with a LED was specially developed by a team at the university of Illinois, it is thinner than a human hair.

Having assessed that the next step was to invent a device that could be implanted in the brain and that could generate pulses of light. This is what they managed to do.

A LED amongst kidney cells

As you can see in the photo they managed to create a tiny LED that can be radio controlled and whose dimensions are similar to the dimension of a neurone (in the figure the LED is compared to kidney cells, and their size is similar to that of neurones).

So far the technology developed has been used to understand brain connections but in the future the researchers expect it to be applied to a variety of situations, extending also to other organs.

A first application is foreseen in the management of chronic pain, inserting LEDs that can interact with peripheral nerves to block pain signals.

They also expect that by using different colours it can be possible to activate different “circuits” in the brain, hence increasing the level of control possible.

Whilst application in health care is important, the growing understanding of the brain and the possibility to control it raises ethical issues that we never have to face before.

I stumbled on a nice info graphic explaining how the Google glasses work and I would like to share it adding some considerations.

Google has announced the price: 1,500$. Not cheap in terms of mass market, amazingly chip in terms of technology.

More than the price, however, the real issue is the “wearability” of the glasses. And this goes beyond the feeling of wearing glasses (they can be worn also over normal glasses). How does it feel to have an overlaid image on reality?

Can Google glasses, or copycats, become a normal apparel people wear or will they remain a gadget? This, I think is the real question. In the second case we will see several, even many of them, but they won’t change our life. In the first case they will become part of our daily life and indeed will change our relation with the world.

Well, it doesn’t seem to make any sense, does it? But suppose you are not the one that is supposed to see it, then, it can make sense!

This is what researchers at A*STAR are proposing with the invention of a printer that can print at the amazing density of 100,000 dots per inch. A normal printer prints at 1,200 dot per inch and that is plenty since our eyes cannot resolve more than 300 dot per inch (max). So present printers are already overdoing it.

The researchers have invented a method where the colour is not resulting from a tiny droplets of ink, as it is the case in today’s printers, but it results from the different wavelength reflected by nano spikes. The size of each nano spike is such that it reflects a specific wavelength.

As shown in the figure on the side they create nano spikes (or posts) that can be as small as 1 nm (they came actually in three sizes, 1, 5 and 15 to reflect the three wavelength of blue, green and red) and 95 nm tall.

Simply by varying the sizes of the posts and their placement researchers have been able to create all the colours of the rainbow.

They use nanotechnology to create these post on a substrate of silicon and each post is covered by a metal cap. This is crucial since when I said that they reflect certain wavelength I was not exactly telling the truth (although this is the final effect…).

What really happens is that the incoming wavelength create ripples on the electron on the surface of the metal caps, what physicists call plasmons (already addressed in a previous post). These plasmons generate photons at a specific wavelength, depending on the size and spacing of the posts.

Now the interesting part. Why would you want to achieve such a resolution given the fact that it is beyond the capability of human eyes to appreciate it? Well, optical sensors can have that kind of resolution and the researchers are seeing this as a very good method to create unique identity codes that can be read by machines and a very though one to duplicate!

Indeed it is very complex to create the negative matrix that is being used to create a specific print. But once you have that it is straightforward to print as many copies as you need. Hence, a wine producers will need to invest quite a bit of money to have its own matrix but then it can quickly and cheaply create as many labels as needed for all its bottles!

Just few weeks ago I reported on a successful experiment carried out by Duke and Natal Universities that proved possible to send brain signals from the brain of a rat in the US to one in Brasil.

And now I stumbled onto a news that a joint research team in South Korea and US have managed to send signals from a human brain to a rat brain. And as they are announcing the results they claim the road is open for sending signal from a human brain to another human brain.

The experiment was performed by placing sensors to detect EEG on the head of a volunteer. The person looked at stroboscopic lights on a screen. This generated a pattern that could be detected by a computer reading the EEG. This pattern can be modulated by the person thinking on moving the rats tail left or right, hence the computer could detect the “thought” of that person and send the signal over a telecommunications link.

The signal transmitted to the rat via a communication link was converted by another computer at the receiving end to  drive a transducer that focussed ultrasound on the rat’s brain. The ultrasound creates pressure waves on the rat’s brain that results in a stimulation of specific areas of the rat brain inducing specific activities. The rat was anaesthetised, to keep it still and be able to precisely focus the ultrasound, although in principle there won’t be any need for anaesthesia.  Indeed the experiment shown that a person thought can be send to a rat brain and stimulated it to move its tale left or right.

You might say, rightly so, that it is like having found a way to drip a drop of water into a valley whilst what would be needed is to flood that valley with a mighty river to create a lake.

And then, wasn’t the Volta experiment showing the possibility to create  a tiny spark of electricity quite similar? What can you ever do with such a tiny spark? Well that was the start of a revolution that has brought us where we are now. All of our life everyday experience wouldn’t have been possible without demonstrating the capability of generating a little spark.

Well, you might say that it took us over 200 year from that fateful November 7th, 1801, when Volta presented the experiment to Napoleon at the Institut de France in Paris. Will we have to wait 200 years to move from this “move tail left or right” to the seamless communication of thoughts among human brains (or interspecies brains!)?

I don’t think so. The progress of technology is such that we experience a compression of time, the amount of evolution we had in the last 50 years will be matched by the one we can expect in the next 18 months. May be Kurzweil is right predicting a singularity by 2030.

With the progress of technology and the availability of smart materials we can rest assured of a future, by the end of this decade I would say, where most surfaces will double up as screen and interaction points.

The sketchy representation of a future cell phone patented by Apple

I had the opportunity of discussing with a start up founder just few days ago. He is focussing on new ways to interact with information based on advanced capabilities offered by Surface 2 (MS) and others. Today these technologies are still quite expensive but the day when they will become commodities is on sight.

The interesting thing, I think, is that the interaction will no longer be a property of the device, rather it will be a property of the person interacting! That is to say that if I am interacting with the surface of a desk in a public space, like  a kiosk in a mall, that surface will first recognise who I am and then will react accordingly. This can be achieved in several ways, by an identification service in the “cloud” or by an interaction with an identity tag embedded in my body (just to name to extreme cases).

The availability of plastic screens, like AMOLED, or ones based on Graphene (NED can be considered a first step in this direction) will make it possible to “wrap” any surface with a screen and touch sensitivity. This, I guess, is the technological bases for a patent presented by Apple and described by ZDNet of a cell phone having a wrap around screen, as shown in the drawing above.

The curvature of the surface, according to interpretation by ZDNet, can be used to provide a sense of 3D. The wrap around can also be used to identify (my speculation) the user by “sensing” some characteristics of her hand.

Not sure if and when we are going to see an iPhone like that but for sure the new smart materials invented every day by researches are freeing designer imagination.

Just at the turn of the century, as the Internet bubble was expanding, a start up came up with the idea of coupling odors with images displayed on the screen. They created a device that could plug in into a USB port of the computer and that, like a printer, had a number of cartridges each with a specific aroma. By combining them upon reception of a request it delivered a certain aroma.

Does it smell good?

They did not succeed. The result, I was told, was not as expected from a perceptual point of view. The aroma lingered in the ambient and mixed one another. The cost was also significant and there were too few information provider ready to provide the instruction to the device about when and what to spray in the ambient.

A few years ago the idea was tried out in some cinemas, under the name “Smell-o-vision”. It really remained limited to a few places and very few movies, more demos than a real application.

Now, at the University  of Agriculture and Technology in Japan a team of researchers have created a screen with the possibility to create a specific aroma, like coffee, and to make it feel as if it is coming from a specific area on the screen. So the idea is that you are shown a coffee cup in the upper left corner of the screen and from there comes a whiff of coffee aroma to hit your nose!

To do this they have inserted on the four corners of the screen tiny holes from where a stream of aroma can be emitted. By varying the intensity of the stream they are able to localize the sensation to a specific part of the screen.

The odors are created by vaporizing special pellets that produce the desired scent. So far the system can only manage one scent at a time but the goal is to be able to recreate a variety of aromas.

I am still doubtful that such a system may become a market darling. Our sensation of smell, although very crude in comparison to the one of our dog, is quite complex at the perception level and the feeling generated by an odor depends on the whole context. What you perceive as a wonderful “see smell” when walking on a beach is perceived as a rotten odor if you where to smell it as you walk on a trail in the countryside…

Hence recreating the sensation of an odor goes far beyond replicating the odor molecules…

Anyhow, it shows that researchers keep exploring many ways to make our virtual interaction closer to reality.

Holograms have been around for decades now. They are based on the principle of light interference. Using two laser beams scientists can record this “interference” on a plastic material that when hit by light can re-create the original image in a 3D space. One can get rid of the plastic and use the two laser beams to create the 3D object image in space.

Holograms are nice to see, but their size is limited (because of the complexity in keeping the interference under control) and the amount of detail, including colour rendition, is pretty poor.

In addition, it is impossible (with present technology) to create a moving hologram, that is an hologram that can show a moving object. This again is due to technology limitation: controlling the interference to recreate the image of a moving object is simply beyond our present capabilities.

Here comes the news from HP researchers. They have managed to approach the holography not with interfering light beams but through diffraction.

They adopted a multi-directional diffractive backlight technology using as input many 2D images that get “diffracted” in a coherent way depending on the point of view of the viewer providing two images at slightly separated point of view: in other words the left and right eye get two different perspectives of the same image and this is used by the brain to recreate the 3D perception.

This approach is manageable with present computational capacity and can therefore be used to create moving 3D holography-like objects. In the photo a snapshot of one image created. Take a look at the video clip to see the moving object.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Y1m7xEzlhWA

The 3D rendering requires a special hardware, of course, hence what you see in the clip is not the real 3D effect. You would need a display that can create this continuous diffractions (see the magnified image of it on the left), but you don’t need any glasses since the couple of images are diffracted in such a way to hit the two eyes independently one of the other.

This effect can be achieved both by changing the point of view (moving your head) or by tilting the screen.

The HP researchers expect that these kind of screen can be used in a next generation of cell phones supporting new applications, beyond the obvious ones in the game domain. Education, remote diagnoses in health care, 3D maps, 3D modelling in architecture and so on are possible area of applications.