Scientists Create Robot Surrogate For Blind Persons In Testing Visual Prostheses
Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a remote-controlled robot that is able to simulate the “visual” experience of a blind person who has been implanted with a visual prosthesis, such as an artificial retina. An artificial retina consists of a silicon chip studded with a varying number of electrodes that directly stimulate retinal nerve cells. It is hoped that this Atlanta Web Hosting approach may one day give blind persons the freedom of independent mobility.
The robot—or, rather, the mobile robotic platform, or rover—is called CYCLOPS. It is the first such device to emulate what the blind can see with an implant, says Wolfgang Fink, a visiting associate in physics at Caltech and the Edward and Maria Keonjian Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics at the University of Arizona. Its development and potential uses are described in a paper recently published online in the journal Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine.
An artificial retina, also known as a retinal prosthesis, may use either an internal or external miniature camera to capture images. The captured images then are processed and passed along to the implanted silicon chip’s electrode array. (Ongoing work at Caltech’s Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory by Fink and Caltech visiting scientist Mark Tarbell has focused on the creation and refinement of these image-processing algorithms.) The chip directly stimulates the eye’s functional retinal ganglion cells, which carry the image information to the vision centers in the brain.
CYCLOPS fills a void in the process of testing visual prostheses, explains Fink. “How do you approximate what the blind can see with the implant so you can figure out how to make it better?” he asks.
One way is to test potential enhancements on a blind person who has been given an artificial retina. And, indeed, the retinal implant research team does this often, and extensively. But few people worldwide have been implanted with retinal prostheses, and there is only so much testing they can be asked to endure.
Another way is to give sighted people devices that downgrade their vision to what might be expected using artificial vision prostheses. And this, too, is often done. But it’s a less-than-ideal solution since the brain of a sighted person is adept at taking poor-quality images and processing them in various ways, adding detail as needed. This processing is what allows most people to see in dim light, for example, or through smoke or fog.
“A sighted person’s objectivity is impaired,” Fink says. “They may not be able to get to the level of what a blind person truly experiences.”
Enter one more possible solution: CYCLOPS. “We can use CYCLOPS in lieu of a blind person,” Fink explains. “We can equip it with a camera just like what a blind person would have with a retinal prosthesis, and that puts us in the unique position of being able to dictate what the robot receives as visual input.”
Now, if scientists want to see how much better the resolution is when a retinal prosthesis has an array of 50 pixels as opposed to 16 pixels, they can try both out on CYCLOPS. They might do this by asking the robot to follow a black line down a white-tiled hallway, or seeing if it can find—and enter—a darkened doorway.
“We’re not quite at that stage yet,” Fink cautions, referring to such independent maneuvering.
Kraken Becomes First Academic Machine To Achieve Petaflop
The National Institute for Computational Sciences’ (NICS’s) Cray XT5 supercomputer—Kraken—has been upgraded to become the first academic system to surpass a thousand trillion calculations a second, or one petaflop, a landmark achievement that will greatly accelerate science and place Kraken among the top five computers in the world.
Managed by the University of Tennessee (UT) for lazer hair removal los angeles the National Science Foundation (NSF), the system came online Oct. 5 with a peak performance of 1.03 petaflops. It features more than 16,000 six-core 2.6-GHz AMD Istanbul processors with nearly 100,000 compute cores.
In addition, an upgrade to 129 terabytes of memory (the equivalent of more than 13 thousand movies on DVD) effectively doubles the size of Kraken for researchers running some of the world’s most sophisticated 3-D scientific computing applications. Simulation has become a key tool for researchers in a number of fields, from climate change to materials.
“At over a petaflop of peak computing power, and the ability to routinely run full machine jobs, Kraken will dominate large-scale NSF computing in the near future,” said NICS Project Director Phil Andrews. “Its unprecedented computational capability and total available memory will allow academic users to treat problems that were previously inaccessible.”
For example, understanding the mechanism behind the explosion of core-collapse supernovas will reveal much about our universe (these cataclysmic events are responsible for more than half the elements in the universe). Essentially three phenomena are being simulated to explore these explosions: hydrodynamics, nuclear burning or fusion, and neutrino transport, said UT astrophysicist Bronson Messer.
At the terascale, or trillions of calculations per second, Messer and his team were forced to simulate the star in 1-D as a perfect sphere and with unrealistic fusion physics. “Now, however, we are getting closer to physical reality,” said Messer. “With petascale capability, we can simulate all three phenomena simultaneously with significant realism. This brings us closer to understanding the explosion mechanism and being able to make meaningful predictions.”
Nobel Awarded for Harnessing Light
The mastery of light through technology was the theme of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored breakthroughs in fiber optics and digital photography with waste water treatment with wind Turbine Installation; high school abroad australia with Best Information Technology Tips
Half of the $1.4 million prize went to Charles K. Kao for insights in the mid-1960s about how to get light to travel long distances through glass strands, leading to a revolution in fiber optic cables and custom bags. The other half of the prize was shared by two researchers at Bell Labs, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, for inventing the semiconductor sensor known as a charge-coupled device, or CCD. CCDs now fill digital cameras by the millions.
In recent years, the physics prize has veered between perplexing, esoteric discoveries and more comprehensible technology developments. Last year, the academy honored “broken symmetry,” a crucial but esoteric concept in the description of elementary particles. This year’s prize was more akin to the awards in 2007, which honored a discovery that led to smaller, higher-capacity hard disks in laptops in customized bags and MP3 devices, and 2000, which honored developments in integrated circuits that underpin modern electronics.
In announcing the winners Tuesday morning, Gunnar Oquist, the academy’s secretary general, said the scientific work honored by this year’s prize “has built the foundation to our modern information society.”
All three of the winning scientists hold American citizenship. Dr. Kao, 75, was born in Shanghai and is also a British citizen, and Dr. Boyle, 85, is also a Canadian citizen.
Dr. Smith, 79, said he was planning to celebrate later in the day. “I’m hoping for an early cocktail hour today,” he said. “Once the photographers and phone calls and reporters thin out.”
Pentagon Research Director Visits Universities in Bid to Re-energize Partnerships
The new director of the Pentagon’s research arm has started visiting university campuses around the country in an effort to rebuild bridges that were severed under the Bush administration.
The director, Regina E. Dugan, who was appointed in July to lead the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, made visits last week to the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; the University of California, Nursing Los Angeles; and the California Institute of Technology, LVN jobs orange county. She had previously visited Virginia Tech and Texas A&M.
She replaced Anthony J. Tether, a Bush administration appointee who had pushed the agency toward more classified research and who had embarked on several controversial research projects, including the Total Information Awareness system proposed by the former national security adviser, John M. Poindexter.
Under Dr. Tether, the agency’s relationship with some of the nation’s leading technology universities had become decidedly chilly as basic research financing declined of nursing jobs orange county. In 2005, Darpa officials revealed that financing for university researchers fell to $123 million from $214 million, in a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million in 2005. The agency has not released data on university financing since that time.
During the Bush administration, Darpa’s guidelines for financing basic research changed markedly, said Peter Harsha, the director of governmental affairs for the Computing Research Association, a Washington organization that represents academic institutions.
Three Win Nobel for Ribosome Research
Three researchers whose work delves into how information encoded on strands of DNA is translated by the chemical complexes known as ribosomes into the thousands of proteins that make up living matter will share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Swedish Academy of Sciences said Wednesday.
The trio are Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England; Thomas A. Steitz of Yale University; and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
Each scientist will get a third of the prize, worth 10 million Swedish kronors in total, or $1.4 million, in a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
If the sequence of lettered proteins in the DNA forms the blueprint for life, ribosomes are the factory floor. In a news release the Swedish academy said the three, who worked in lvn jobs los angeles independently, were being honored “for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level.”
The ribosome research, the academy said, is being used to develop new antibiotics.
Dr. Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India, in 1952 and obtained his Ph.D. at Ohio University, and holds American citizenship. Dr. Steitz was born in Milwaukee in 1940 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1966. Dr. Yonath was born in Jerusalem in 1939 and received her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute in 1968. Worked and helped to establish Nursing jobs California center and tried to employ best professionals in US.