fMRI Lets Israeli Student Control Robot In France With His Mind 92
MrSeb writes "An Israeli student has become the first person to meld his mind and movements with a robot surrogate, or avatar. Situated inside an fMRI scanner in Israel, Tirosh Shapira has controlled a humanoid robot some 2000 kilometers (1250 miles) away, at the Béziers Technology Institute in France, using just his mind. The system must be trained so that a particular "thought" (fMRI blood flow pattern) equates to a certain command. In this case, when Shapira thinks about moving forward or backward, the robot moves forward or backward; when Shapira thinks about moving one of his hands, the robot surrogate turns in that direction. To complete the loop, the robot has a camera on its head, with the image being displayed in front of Shapira. Speaking to New Scientist, it sounds like Shapira really became one with the robot: 'It was mind-blowing. I really felt like I was there, moving around,' he says. 'At one point the connection failed. One of the researchers picked the robot up to see what the problem was and I was like, "Oi, put me down!"'"
I didn't know Israelis said 'Oi' (Score:2)
Thought that was always just the Aussies. Huh.
The story is interesting, although somehow not that exciting as this kind of advancement is...necessary and expected.
When we can actually upload data to our brains and have thoughts translated to a phonetic language...then we will have something that will move mankind forward generations.
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It is short for 'Oi Vey'
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When Israelis say it it's spelled "Oy" and is usually followed by "vey!"
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... and then "my life already!".
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Thought that was always just the Aussies. Huh.
chavs, not australians.
http://failblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/guidos-bros-douchebags-fratboys-bros-different-culture-same-bro.jpg [wordpress.com]
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More Aussies than chavs. Aussie aussie aussie, oi oi oi. etc.
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I've picked up colloquialisms from visiting a place (eg Stockholm), watching TV (eg UK), or just being around people in the US from different backgrounds (eg Russia).
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Thought that was always just the Aussies. Huh.
The story is interesting, although somehow not that exciting as this kind of advancement is...necessary and expected.
When we can actually upload data to our brains and have thoughts translated to a phonetic language...then we will have something that will move mankind forward generations.
Science and technology do not generally proceed by paradigm-shifting-breakthroughs, but by incremental improvements.
Re:Old news (Score:4, Funny)
Israel has been mind-controlling America for a long time.
But now with computers!
what's next (Score:2, Interesting)
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mind melding with your partners sex toy
Don't worry about the moderation. 10 years from now it will be meta-modded +5 Psychic.
Re:what's next (Score:4, Funny)
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I can't help but thinking the first person to do this will be thinking, "It's dark in here!"
You'll just have to employ the Doom 3 duck tape mod and wrap a torch to it.
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Selling out the last vestiges of their journalistic integrity in exchange for page views.
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-Slashdot
-Forefront of technology news
pick one
Next Step (Score:5, Interesting)
is to combine this technology with remotely piloted drones, spy-copters, and eventually combat robots. Then I can imagine a military formation formed up to receive orders, being told they were going to war, and then told to go to it - and no one needs to move :P
Re:Next Step (Score:5, Interesting)
If such technology existed, why would that be better than a keyboard and mouse or a gamecontroller as an interface? And using my extensive experience in an environment where they have been used for "combative" purposes I ask: why is a huge latency desirable? And how is a human better than an aimbot?
Human lives are cheaper than advanced combat robots (with or without AI). The notion that no sacrifice in blood has to be made in war might be alluring to democratic politicians and their constituencies, but the sooner democracies in the world stop initiating wars the better the world will be off. Thus I am happy to say that due to economics drone armies will not conquer the world*, either under the pretext of humane intervention or blatant imperialism.**
* Conquest is long lived occupation (with repression) not mere military victory. The technological saturation point of destruction has already been reached, no further advancement is required.
** If you read between the lines of this comment a "Fuck the USA" can be spotted.
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I imagine some AI needs to be developed anyway, latency and all that.
Re:Next Step (Score:5, Insightful)
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The only reason you think of a military formation is that modern society is so far removed from necessary physical interactions with nature.
And your solution is to have even farmers interact with the earth only remotely?
No, the reason to think of the military is because the military benefits most from removing its people from where the action is.
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And your solution is to have even farmers interact with the earth only remotely?
Obviously. If people would like to interact with nature, they would. It's not like we are choosing to do what we hate. The only reason we romanticize nature is because we are so removed from it. In reality, survival is struggle against nature. The only reason we are able to forget that is because we have gotten so good at it.
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Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the comments so far seem to confuse EEG-based interfaces with fMRI-based ones, or local with telerobotics, but no great surprise there. The politics is sad, but again only to be expected.
We still can't do true mind-control of robots (there's no way to read minds yet, we can only say "pattern X equals action Y", which is not the same thing) but this is an interesting development to say the least. Think in terms of medicine. Robotic interfaces in surgery are typically data gloves or joystick, plus goggles, but muscles have poor granularity of control, data gloves and joysticks reduce this further, and goggles are incredibly low-res. If they get to the point where surgeons are limited only by the precision of their mind, you're looking at a major revolution.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
The bigger issue, it seems to be, is feedback. Sure, you can train the machine to "read" certain patterns with attempts to move the arm, and potentially create very advanced interfaces, but the interface is purely one-way: there is no way to tell the human he has "touched" something. Cameras work to some extent to provide visual feedback, but more advanced and more delicate control requires something beyond just that. We need to find a way to provide neural feedback to replicate the sense of touch, at the very least. Sight can be provided easily (without requiring a neural interface), as can hearing, and smell is largely unneeded, but for an arm, touch feedback is essential.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. Force-feedback is a start, albeit a crude one, but it's not enough. It might be possible to electrically stimulate individual pressure nerves to give a sense of touch, since nerves are electrical by nature, but you're talking an amazing number of electrodes to get any detail and some major technological problems to get it to stimulate the right nerves.
For something that is compressible/expandable to some degree along only certain directions, you can simulate that with pneumatics. It's essentially the same as force-feedback (you apply pressure in one direction, something applies force in the opposite direction) but instead of having one or two motors, you can have a crude surface where each point applies different feedback. Mechanical devices of this kind aren't complex, require no new technology to be invented, and would be in the price range of a decent facility - I assume you don't hear of them because there's simply no scientific or industrial application outside of perhaps telerobotic pottery-making and there's not really a huge market for that, and the increase in the number of variables that could be fed back to the user is still going to be extremely small - an increase from 2 to 12 sounds reasonable - but the cost would be substantially more than 6x that of a joystick. The cost/benefit isn't there.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
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But isn't this what you are doing when you learn how to do something physical like play a guitar or pianno, or tennis, etc? Your mind equates how you move your fingers or body to a result or external action on your environment and you say to yourself, that's good or that's bad and you store the information. So now you know that if your fingers do X, you get Y note from the instrument, or you hit the ball. As far as I can tell, a
Temporal resolution (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think an fMRI interface is going to be very useful for controlling robots, because of the issue of temporal resolution. I think you can only acquire an fMRI image once every couple of seconds (at most). The above poster referred to the "granularity" issue with data gloves and joysticks, but it's a thousandfold worse with fMRI and probably always will be.
A better choice might be magnetoencephalography (MEG). Nearly instantaneous "image" acquisition, and as a side benefit, there are no health risks to the user (fMRI bombards you with intense magnetic fields and no one really knows if that's safe).
Don't need thought control to feel you are there (Score:5, Interesting)
Ask any good backhoe operator about how he operates the machine and you'll find he doesn't think about the mechanics of his arms and feet interacting with the control levers. His brain abstracts all that and treats the hoe as an extension of his body. Once you've been trained how to move the controls, you stop thinking about it. You just dig.
A similar feeling could be generated simply by video goggles and a joystick. In fact when I fly my airplane using a video downlink, it feels like "I'm there." Seeing yourself on the ground is a bit weird! I can look down at something, turn the plane to look at something all without really thinking about what my hands need to do, since they've been trained and my brain just does that automatically in response to what I want to do. This is true of normal RC airplane flying as well. People often ask me how I can remember to move my fingers in the opposite direction as the plane is flying towards me but the truth is I don't think about it at all very much. I just move the airplane where I want it to be.
The exciting goal of thought control, though, is obviously to enable people who don't have the use of limbs or fingers to control and interact with robotics, such as an artificial limb, as if it is part of the body. And as the test subject can attest, that's pretty much what happens with training. Now if they can just get the sensor equipment to weight less than a few tons and not draw metal objects towards it...
Sweet (Score:1)
Nearly there till hot blue alien sex.....come on you where all thinking it....
Passport (Score:4, Interesting)
If you are in Israel with a physical (but virtual) presence device in France, do you need a passport?
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I admire Israel in most ways, but I still think they need to keep a lid on the extreme religious right wingers... And a lot of Israelis would agree with me..
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I don't buy the "if you criticise anything at all about Israel then you're anti-semitic" argument, myself.
That's nice. I didn't make that argument, however. I made the argument that the 2 posters in question were anti-semitic and their criticism of Israel was just an outlet for their antisemitism. Actually, that was my judgement of their posts. I didn't really make any arguments to back up my claim... nor do I have to when I am being snide. And I was obviously being snide.
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Now explain again why criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic?
Didn't say it was. I made statement about 2 individuals -- not about a general concept. Those two were criticizing Israel as an outlet for their antisemitism. In fact, I made no statement about criticism of Israel in general. Israel, for example, has a high road traffic fatality rate. If you criticize their traffic laws, I don't think that would be antisemitic. In fact, claiming that criticism of Israel's traffic safety is antisemitic would be kooky. I just don't buy the assertion that the two posters
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What information, apart from the posts themselves (which criticize Israel), did you use to deduce that the posters were anti-Semitic?
As I mentioned in another post, my judgement. Fully rational argument is only possible in the presence of perfect information. In the absence of full information (as is always the case with any individual posting on the Internet ), one must make estimates of truth value of statements, motivations, emotions, etc. based on one's best guess. And from the manner of those posts I judge the posters to be more concerned with finding an outlet for their racism/antisemitism than with any actual facts about Israel
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could you please keep these claims to yourself?
You know that being polite about saying "shut up" doesn't actually make you more polite, right? It just makes you a prick.
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...The only rational conclusion for a reader is that either you believe...
isn't even remotely accurate. The logically consistent statement would have been "...One possible conclusion for a reader is that either you believe..."
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You are misunderstanding the nature of discussion and debate.
Given how simple the concepts are, you should think twice before throwing this accusation out. Really.
if you cannot explain the reasons for the claims that you make,
I have explained it. You just haven't accepted the explanation. Which is fine. Reasonable people can disagree.
people react emotionally to terms like "anti-semite"
Well, I think people also react emotionally to antisemitic behavior itself. And to racist behavior. Those are not rational behaviors. They can't be reasoned away. Let me draw an analogy. Let's say your friend has a scar. And a bully at a play yard keeps talking about how ugly he is because
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Given the succession of increasingly corrupt loons running the country since the transition to "democracy" they were probably right not to.
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I am Jewish (by origin, not by their shitheaded religion), and I think, government of Israel is a bunch of racist, ethnocentric theocrats that deserve nothing better than a kick in the nuts.
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Actually no, it's not possible to be Jewish and antisemitic. There are certain Jews who treat any attacks against themselves as antisemitism, and they should just shut up because it's stupid.
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Actually no, it's not possible to be Jewish and antisemitic.
That's a laugh. Of course, it is. It's very, very common, in fact.
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If you are in Israel with a physical (but virtual) presence device in France, do you need a passport?
Yes, in the same way that when I access slashdot from the UK I need a fucking American visa and have to anally probe myself for explosives.
Brain vs. mind (Score:3)
Shouldn't that be brain instead of mind?
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No. Using the word 'mind' simply indicates that the brain activity which controls the robot is conscious. So it specifies rather than confuses.
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I might be conscious, but is the brain activity conscious? Or did you mean that the brain activity was the result of a conscious decision?
A triumph of sci-hype and wishful thinking (Score:1)
Oy! Mind meld, my recto-tectal tract! Functional assertions not withstanding, MRI derived blood flow and oxygen usage patterns are not algorithmically equatable with thought...
Existing MRI scanners are overwhelming auditory assault systems, and I can (in my sf-enthusiast imagination) conceive of no better way of limiting military drone pilot endurance than to link one to a state of the art MRI scanner. As if current Raptor trailer sessions probably don't produce enough "Hellfire" stress, in theory...
Of c
Star Trek: Next Generation. (Score:2)
"An Israeli student has become the first person to meld his mind and movements with a robot surrogate, or avatar.
LaForge will be happy to hear this.
and everyone but me hated Caprica! (Score:2)
fMRI (Score:3)
2000km? (Score:3)
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And do you realize how *LOUD* they are when they are firing? The powerful, high frequency magnetic fields cause noticeable mechanical forces on the superconducting material itself, and the thing goes
BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG
when it's firing. It's like having your head inside a pot while God hits it with a baseball bat. This is not conducive to fine motor skills in person, much less over a remote link.
Yes, but .... (Score:4, Funny)
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Observer: Like, "raise my left arm"?
Rawhide: Or "throw the harpoon." People are gonna come from all over. This boy's an Eskimo.
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Wow you are an idiot. Have you ever been to Israel? Do you even know who the Palestinians are or where that name even comes from? I could rant on I am sure for many paragraphs uselessly, so I'll try to keep it relatively short...until you know our history, come to our country, see the reality on the ground, and educate yourself regarding the problems, please refrain from making misinformed ridiculous comments.
I think you are confused who the occupiers are. You try living somewhere where you are surrounded b
The other direction would be more interesting ... (Score:4, Interesting)
. . . how about a robot controlling a human with its mind . . . ? Now that would be definitely more interesting, and would foster more vivacious cocktail party talk.
surrogates (Score:1)
Surrogates [imdb.com] covered the side-effects of such a development.