Dharmendra S. Modha

The following from the iCub website:

"RobotCub is a 5 years long project funded by the European Commission through Unit E5 "Cognition". Our main goal is to study cognition through the implementation of a humanoid robot the size of a 2 year old child: the iCub."

The following is the abstract of RobotCub paper:

"We describe a research initiative in embodied cognition that will create and exploit a 54 degree-of-freedom humanoid robot. This humanoid — RobotCub — is currently being designed and the final system will be made freely available to the scientific community through an open systems GNU-like general public licence. In addition, we describe a research agenda in cognitive systems that is based on the co-developmental learning through embodied physical interation: exploration, manipulation, imitation, and communication. This agenda borrows heavily from experience in developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. All cognitive software associated with RobotCub will also be available under the open systems licence."

A new article in Nature Neuroscience:

Abstract: "Sleep replay of awake experience in the cortex and hippocampus has been proposed to be involved in memory consolidation. However, whether temporally structured replay occurs in the cortex and whether the replay events in the two areas are related are unknown. Here we studied multicell spiking patterns in both the visual cortex and hippocampus during slow-wave sleep in rats. We found that spiking patterns not only in the cortex but also in the hippocampus were organized into frames, defined as periods of stepwise increase in neuronal population activity. The multicell firing sequences evoked by awake experience were replayed during these frames in both regions. Furthermore, replay events in the sensory cortex and hippocampus were coordinated to reflect the same experience. These results imply simultaneous reactivation of coherent memory traces in the cortex and hippocampus during sleep that may contribute to or reflect the result of the memory consolidation process."

See also the related News & Views article.

"Microsoft on Wednesday took the wraps off its first commercial operating system for robots, with hopes of paving the way for a broader robotics industry and taking a central role in its development. "

"The technology, called Microsoft Robotics Studio, is a Windows-based software platform designed to make it relatively simple to program robots–real or simulated."

See the original article –>

"It is a brain map like no other, has been three years in the making, and promises a revolution in neuroscience: a genomic atlas of the mouse brain has been crafted."

"…the Allen Brain Atlas contains 85 million images, and enough data to fill 20,000 iPods. The atlas documents the activity of more than 21,000 genes across the entire mouse brain in such fine detail that it is possible pick out individual cells."

See original news article –> 

Visit Allen Institute –>

Also, Paul Allen was named this month to Scientific American 50 list.

Today, we had an incredible time with Professor Bruno Olshausen who heads the Redwood Center at UC Berkeley, and is Associate Professor, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and School of Optometry, UC Berkeley.

He described the state-of-the-art in the knowledge about the primary visual cortex (V1). Here is the abstract:

Nervous systems have evolved impressive abilities to extract useful information about the environment from images. This talk will review some highlights of what has been learned from a combination of psychophysical, neurophysiological, and computational studies of the visual system, in addition to those aspects that remain a mystery. I will also describe some new organizing principles which provide hope for elucidating the function of visual cortex.