My friend Zoran organised a trip to his town in Croatia where we stayed for few days and visited lots of places. Have a look at some of the pictures I uploaded.

The dimensions of the iCub are similar to that of a 3.5 year old child and in its final version, will have 53 actuated degrees of freedom organized as follows:

7 for each arm
9 for each hand (3 for the thumb, 2 for the index, 2 for the middle finger, 1 for the coupled ring and little finger, 1 for the abduction)
6 for the head
3 for the torso and spine
6 for each leg 

Months ago, we sent our iCub robot back to IIT (Italian Institute of Technology) for an upgrade, which involves new body covers, full head cover with face expressions and eye lids, new force-torque sensors on legs and arms, new PC104 computer situated inside iCub's head, improved hands with new sensors as well as new stand and power cables.

iCub is going to be a part of a larger supercluster system that setup in our lab (see previous posts) and already me and Tony Morse are developing applications that make use of the latest CUDA enabled GPU processors (Tesla and Fermi architectures) to achieve near realtiime speeds.

For scientific papers click here. 

Excerpt from one of Bronnikov's papers:

"Recently, training in the so-called alternative or direct vision of sighted, weakly sighted, and blind subjects was conducted in several cities of Russia and CIS. It uses the method by V.M. Bronnikov.

The possibility of direct vision caused much doubts, both with respect to the existence of the phenomenon and its physiological explanation. We present the first results of the study of this phenomenon and some of its brain correlates.

This work is a strictly qualitative pilot study not pre- tending to discover any quantitative patterns. This is associated, first, with the heterogeneity of the subject group and difficulty to work with them. The aim of the study was the verification of the facts of alternative (direct) vision and the possibility to measure the associated physiological parameters (physiological correlates).

This study is based on visual observations of the behavior of subjects pretending to be able to see with eyes closed and the results of electrophysiological analyses (EEG, evoked potentials) of the brains of these subjects. To reveal the brain correlates of the phenomenon, we compared spontaneous electric activity of the brain (EEG) during the viewing of visual stimuli and the comparison of the evoked potentials (EP) during the execution of same type of tasks by the subjects involving the classification of the visual stimuli during the common visual perception and in the state of the so-called alternative vision."

I was sent a video where this method was put in test. It is showing that Bronnikov's son could not do the viewing if he wears different googles. The ESO team was able to 'see' with Bronikov's googles just as well. They claim that the trick was to look through the gaps between nose and googles.

I have not had the time to look through all the scientific publications they published, however, the video clearly shows the inability of Bronnikov's son to see the objects that are higher than the eye level. In the video above, one of the guys who was trained using this method was playing billiard and was explaining that he could create a virtual vision, split it to several virtual screens etc. This would show that what he was getting was pure information and then it is up his personal interpretations that can represent the data in any way he wants. However, this is not what happens when they evaluate the method. The person that is being tested is trying to look here and there, up and down, which is contradicting the whole idea that you do not need physical sight. If the person was just getting the information about objects and representing it through his personal metaphors (as done in remote viewing experiments) then there would be no need to look around. Unfortunately, this seems to be a scam to me as well and it is casting bad light on holistic approaches that try to deal with non-physical phenomena.

 

I have received suggestions to add a functionality to this website to allow users to share the articles on various social networking and bookmarking sites. From now you can share any of the articles by clicking one of your favorite social networking sites displayed as icons at the bottom of every article. I hope this feature will prove useful.

If you have any comments, suggestions or if your favorite social networking site is not listed leave a comment and I will do my best to address the issue.

Couple of weeks ago I finished producing what is now increasingly popular video featuring Thomas Campbell at The Monroe Institute where Tom covers his lifetime research into the nature of consciousness. Today I finished designing the DVD disk, which you will be able to buy from www.mybigtoe.com soon for almost nothing. This video is also available for free in HD resolution on Tom's new Vimeo channel.

Below you can see few snapshots from the DVD menu design. I hope to burn several DVDs tonight and bring them with me to London tomorrow where I am doing a talk on some of my views on consiousness.

We have been accepted another paper for The 10th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for oral presentation in Sapporo, Japan. This paper presents experiments that have been conducted in collaboration with The Advanced Concepts Team of European Space Agency.

C. Ampatzis, D. Izzo, F. Biscani, M. Peniak, B. Bentley, D. Marocco, A. Cangelosi (in press). Evolving complex adaptive exploratory behavior for a planetary rover. The 10th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation in Space (iSAIRAS2010), Sapporo, Japan, 29th August - 2nd September 2010.

 

Thomas Campbell was one of the original consciousness explorers at The Monroe Institute (tmi) in Virginia in the 1970s and the explorer identified as "TC Physicist" in Bob Monroe's book Far Journeys. Campbell, working alongside electrical engineer Dennis Mennerich, discovered what is now known as Hemi-Sync, the binaural-beat approach to inner exploration that came to be almost synonymous with TMI.

As Bob Monroe's protégé, Campbell worked in the TMI lab and participated in explorer sessions as a subject. He was one of the first trainers and finished his tenure at TMI as an advisory-board member.

In his book My Big TOE, Campbell does not spend much time on his personal experiences through his 35 years of exploration. Rather, he concentrates on the inner workings of such subjective adventures as OBEs, remote viewing and healing -- to name just a few -- and much more.

With more than 800 pages in My Big TOE, the reader will find plenty to ponder and absorb. The knowledge gained will bring greater understanding that grows with each subsequent read.

My Big TOE presents a robust overarching model of reality that does a great job of demystifying some of our most cherished beliefs, and it's done with an abundance of humour.

The book beckons you to search within yourself to understand how belief structures colour your outlook. Campbell masterfully nudges you away from the ego traps that keep many from experiencing the Greater Reality for themselves.

With patience and clarity, My Big TOE suggests to readers that they themselves need to create their own TOE -- Theory of Everything -- and that with greater awareness they can find answers for themselves.

My Big TOE by Thomas Campbell is a must read for anybody with questions about why we are here: the very purpose behind our existence.

Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site

The final and improved HD version can now be watched on YouTube. This video is going to be on DVDs soon from www.mybigtoe.com.

Amazing video by Andrew Huang where machine with a doll face mimics images on television screen in search of a satisfactory visage. Doll Face presents a visual account of desires misplaced and identities fractured by our technological extension into the future.

Increasing number of projects that rely on computer simulations inspired us to order more servers that would do the hard work for us. Our collaborative project with the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) of European Space Agency (ESA) requires lots of processing power to run evolutionary robotics (ER) simulations relying on physics engines.

Fabio Ruini, who is a PhD student sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research is also making use of the ER approach to evolve autonomous neural controllers for Micro-Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Such simulations often take days to finish using standard processors. Anthony Morse is also running lots of code for the iCub humanoid robot and Zoran Macura's work for the VALUE research project requires lots of computer power as well. New PhD students have recently joined our group and will need to run their software to

 _{The picture shows one of the servers hooked into my monitors and being configured}

For this reason we got six new eight-cores server machines, which are all connected and can run the heavy processing. However, this is just a standard way to do this. Anthony Morse and I have been inspired by the new and quickly growing paradigm in computation making use of Graphic Processor Units (GPUs) that outperform standard processors by the factor of several magnitudes. Driven by the insatiable market demand for realtime, high-definition 3D graphics, the programmable GPUs have evolved into a highly parallel, multithreaded, manycore processors with tremendous computational horsepower and very high memory bandwidth. Furthermore, their parallelism continues to scale with Moore’s law. For this reason we ordered ten Tesla cards, each of which has 240 cores, 102Gb/sec memory bandwidth and 4Gb dedicated memory. In addition, Tony's and my computer has the latest GeForce 285 overclocked graphics cards, which is very similar to Tesla in processing performance. To see the detailed information of our setup click here. In case you are here looking for the help on how to install Tesla cards on a Linux system then click here for the installation guide I wrote and here for the scripts that you will need.

The collaboration with ESA is an extension of the project I stared as an undergraduate student, however, my main research is for my PhD, which is on the development of actions and language in humanoid robots for the European Union Framework 7 project called iTalk proposed by my supervisor and the project coordinator Angelo Cangelosi. I am developing most of my code using CUDA, which is an extension to C programming language allowing developers to run their applications on GPU-enabled cards. Currently I am working on the implementation of Jun Tani's multiple-timescales recurrent neural network, which will accept various inputs such as vision, proprioception and linguistic input. Both the network as well as the backpropagation through time training algorithm are going to run on the Tesla cards resulting in significant speed increase, which will much appreciated when the system grows in its complexity. Tony has rewritten his code to run on CUDA and his analysis showed 1000x increase in speed.

Writing CUDA code requires slightly different way of logically structuring code since it needs to be executed on hundreds cores and possibly in thousands or even millions threads running simultaneously. I am currently studying CUDA and preparing a one hour tutorial for our research group where me and Tony are going to talk about the new servers and using them both in a standard way as well as in a massively parallelised way using Tesla cards. 

This new and rapidly growing field enabling massively parallel processing does seem very promising and I personally believe that sooner or later most of the computation will be offloaded to GPU processors rather than using standard central processing units.