NEWRON Vol V, Issue XVIII

[Natan Davidovics]

NeuroEngineering Weekly Review of News

 

We hope you were all able to manage over the past few weeks while NEWRON took a summer hiatus.  To reward you all for your patience, this week's NEWRON includes some graphical art, courtesy of a mouse retina that looks like a patch of flowers on steroids.

Interesting NeuroEngineering links:

Hopkins Neuroengineering web site: http://neuroengineering.bme.jhu.edu
New job blog: http://neuroengjobs.blogspot.com/
Blog for administrative questions: http://neuroengineering.blogspot.com
NEWRON on the web!: http://groups.google.com/group/newron?lnk=srg&pli=1

Enjoy,
Natan Davidovics
NEWRON Publishing Corporation

The brain’s connectome – from branch to branch

http://www.mpg.de/4383666/connectome-brain?page=1

The human brain is the most complex of all organs, containing billions of neurons with their corresponding projections, all woven together in a highly complex, three-dimensional web. To date, mapping this vast network posed a practically insurmountable challenge to scientists. Now, however, a research team from the Heidelberg-based Max Planck Institute for Medical Research has developed a method for tackling the mammoth task. Using two new computer programs, KNOSSOS and RESCOP, a group of over 70 students mapped a network of more than 100 neurons – and they did so faster and more accurately than with previous methods.

British researchers design a million-chip neural network 1/100 as complex as your brain

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/07/arm_project_spinnaker_super/

If you want some idea of the complexity of the human brain, consider this: a group of British universities plans to link as many as a million ARM processors in order to simulate just a small fraction of it. The resulting model, called SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network architecture), will represent less than one percent of a human's gray matter, which contains 100 billion neurons. (Take that,mice brains!) Yet even this small scale representation, researchers believe, will yield insight into how the brain functions, perhaps enabling new treatments for cognitive disorders, similar to previous models that increased ourunderstanding of schizophrenia. As these neural networks increase in complexity, they come closer to mimicking human brains -- perhaps even developing the ability to make their own Skynet references. (From Engadget)

Researchers Mimic Nature to Create a ‘Bio-Inspired Brain’ for Robots

http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=108920&CultureCode=en

A group of engineers at NUI Galway and the University of Ulster are developing bio-inspired integrated circuit technology which mimics the neuron structure and operation of the brain. One key goal of the research is the application of the electronic neural device, called a hardware spiking neural network, to the control of autonomous robots which can operate independently in remote, unsupervised environments, such as remote search and rescue applications, and in space exploration.