CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-06-18 21:46:01 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Still decompressing from GF2045 and still on my way home. But I wanted to at least post the very briefest summary about it: The Congress was a total, awesome, unmitigated success! What a week. First, a most amazing research summit in Boston, then a Brain Researchers' dinner discussion on the Friday before GF2045 that wouldn't end, and then the excellently orchestrated Congress itself with speakers addressing each of the main areas of the roadmap to Whole Brain Emulation from the perspectives of their cutting edge lab work. Inclusion of the non-science speakers actually worked really well, because it showed how connections could be made with the language and lives of the vast majority of humanity. My extreme gratitude goes to all of the speakers, to those involved in the production of the Congress, and to everyone who came out, attended and participated!! Much more soon!

2013-05-31 05:10:31 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

DEADLINE EXTENSION Special Issue of the Journal of Artificial General Intelligence on "Brain Emulation and Connectomics, a convergence of Neuroscience and Artificial General Intelligence" -- the new submission deadline is July 31, 2013.

We decided to extend the submission deadline to enable several papers in production to be completed, and to provide necessary time for review after GF2045 Congress efforts (which involve several of the editors of the special issue). Output from the Congress will also be eligible for write-up to the special issue: http://carboncopies.org/call-for-papers-jagi-special-issue-on-brain-emulation-and-connectomics-a-convergence-of-neuroscience-and-artificial-general-intelligence

2013-05-27 15:52:27 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

The abstract for my talk at the GF2045 Congress in NYC June 15-16:

Whole Brain Emulation: Reverse Engineering A Mind

Dr. Randal A. Koene, Science Director, 2045 Initiative

My talk will take us from start to finish through the process from our current condition to a possible substrate-independent mind achieved by whole brain emulation. I will address the goal, the criteria for success, the scientific and technological challenges and the feasible solutions. This detailed overview will connect with the projects of the other brain-science speakers at the Congress. I will point out opportunities at technological milestones, such as emerge through access to high-resolution large-scale brain data and the development of improved neural interfaces and neuroprostheses.
Being ultimately depends on one's ability to experience and to do so in the manner that is characteristic of... more »

2013-04-19 02:51:25 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

On September 19th I'll be presenting at the RE.WORK Technology Summit in London, UK
http://www.carboncopies.org/re-work-technology-summit-19-september-2013-london-uk

2013-04-19 02:49:43 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

On the 18th of July, I will be speaking at Humanity+@Beijing
http://www.carboncopies.org/humanity-beijing-28-july-2013-beijing

2013-04-19 02:48:04 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

On the 27th of June, I'll be speaking at the NERVE 2013 Congress on Disruptive Technologies
http://www.carboncopies.org/nerve-2013-disruptive-technology---the-inside-track-25-27-june-cambridge-uk

2013-04-19 02:46:10 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

8-9 June, I will be speaking at the Subtle Technologies 16th Annual Festival, 8-9 June, 2013, Toronto, Canada
http://www.carboncopies.org/subtle-technologies-16th-annual-festival-8-9-june-2013-toronto-canada

2013-04-19 02:40:28 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

On 12 May, I'll be speaking at Resuscitation and Reintegration of Cryonics Patients, 12 May 2013, Portland, OR. The title of my talk: Brain Emulation and Neuroprosthetics: A System of Functions to be Sustained
http://www.carboncopies.org/resuscitation-and-reintegration-of-cryonics-patients-12-may-2013-portland-or

2013-04-17 20:04:36 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Somewhere in New York City... :-)

2013-03-15 03:29:24 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Call for Papers: JAGI Special Issue on Brain Emulation and Connectomics, a convergence of Neuroscience and Artificial General Intelligence -- http://carboncopies.org/call-for-papers-jagi-special-issue-on-brain-emulation-and-connectomics-a-convergence-of-neuroscience-and-artificial-general-intelligence

Please read the call for papers and send us yours by May 31!

2013-03-04 18:59:36 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

TOWARDS A NEW STRATEGY FOR HUMAN EVOLUTION
Friends, our web-site has just gone live for the GF2045 Congress in New York City, June 15-16! It is all about BRAINS and BODIES and the societies we can build.

Among other things, it will feature a full exposition of the ROADMAP toward Substrate-Independent Minds with presentations by the leading scientists of ongoing projects on all pillars of that roadmap (e.g. Ed Boyden, George Church, Ted Berger, etc.)... I will post more about this very soon and there will be materials at carboncopies.org. For now, please go take a look at http://gf2045.com/

2013-01-19 17:48:21 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Probably a repost, but worth another mention at this time: http://www.jamesmartin.com/film/

2013-01-09 01:14:57 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

As posted by Adam Ford: "Randal Koene talks about porting ourselves (our patterns) to resilient substrates. He is a brilliant multidisciplinary scientist with focus on Neuroscience. He is also a great networker and has a great talent for bringing great minds together to think about the long term plans. http://2012.singularitysummit.com.au/2012/11/randal-koene-substrate-independent-minds/

Video on post above or HERE: Randal Koene - SIM (Substrate Independent Minds) - Singularity Summit Australia 2012

Abstract: Every aspect of modern science relies upon creating representations of things. And when we do, we pick the signals that interest us and the behavior that interests us. From that, we determine how to interpret the way input is converted into output in a system. Our description of that process is our understanding of the system. The same is true for mental processes and reverse... more »

2013-01-01 00:22:07 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Heartfelt New Year's wishes to all - may we keep learning and keep improving, making our impact on every next year better than the last!

2012-12-26 18:05:53 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

Whatever you are made of, carbon, silicon or metal, wishing you all a most excellent Holiday Season and a great New Year! :-)

2012-12-17 16:25:50 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Can we determine if we are living inside a simulation? - http://www.insidescience.org/content/what-if-reality-was-really-just-sim-universe/871

2012-11-27 19:12:14 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Come to the H+ San Francisco Conference Dec.1-2 & its ancillary events!! The topic is: Writing the Future. Tons of interesting speakers (actually, an incredibly long list of speakers), including yours truly.
Disclaimer: I have the privilege of playing a minor local co-organizer role by having found the ancillary event hosts at Borderlands Bookstore and Langton Labs. :-)
See the conference write-up on carboncopies.org: http://www.carboncopies.org/humanity-conference-san-francisco-1-2-december-2012

2012-10-14 20:48:38 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 6 +1s)

SFN Satellite Symposium on Whole Brain Circuit Reconstruction

http://sfn2012.carboncopies.org

6:30pm-9pm, Tuesday Oct.16, BRIDGE room, Hilton Riverside New Orleans

This symposium focuses on the ultimate test case grounding hypotheses in neuroscience, namely the reconstruction of neural tissue and whole brains. The four pillars of efforts whole brain circuit reconstruction, which is in essence a System Identification problem are:
* STRUCTURE data acquisition (connectomics, turning a big system identification problem into many simpler ones)
* FUNCTION data acquisition (in-vivo activity reference measurements at large scale and high resolution)
* REPRESENTATION (formalisms and computational methods for a reconstruction, emulation platforms)
* HYPOTHESIS TESTING (iterative testing of assumptions in the other 3 pillars, proofs of concept)

Example... more »

2012-09-16 02:58:58 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

2012-08-16 03:02:49 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Just submitted my AGI-12 paper (submit yours, today is the deadline!): Toward tractable AGI: Challenges for System Identification in Neural Circuitry.

Abstract: Feasible and practical routes to Artificial Intelligent Intelligence involve short-cuts tailored to environments and challenges. A prime example of a system with built-in short-cuts is the human brain. Deriving from the brain the functioning system that implements intelligence and generality at the level of neurophysiology is interesting for many reasons, but also poses a set of specific challenges. Representations an models demand that we pick a constrained set of signals and behaviors of interest. The systematic and iterative process of model building involves what is known as System Identification, which is made feasible by decomposing the overall problem into a collection of smaller System Identification problems. There is a roadmap... more »

2012-08-13 00:56:45 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

On my way down-under! :-)

2012-08-09 17:22:05 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 3 +1s)

Neural augmentation for better senses has arrived! - (Optogenetic) Activation of specific interneurons improves V1 feature selectivity and visual perception http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11312.html

2012-08-03 03:00:36 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

AGI-12 Paper Submission Deadline EXTENDED to August 15

Some good news for tardy AGI authors!

As you may recall, the Fifth Conferences on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-12) will be held Dec 8-11 at Oxford University in the UK.  The AGI conferences are the only major conference series dedicated to research on the creation of thinking machines with general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond.

The carboncopies reference to the NEUROSCIENCE session of AGI-12 with links to full AGI-12 Call for Papers may be found at:

http://carboncopies.org/the-fifth-artificial-general-intelligence-conference-agi-12-at-oxford-dec-8-11-2012

Our proceedings publisher for AGI-12, Springer Lecture Notes in AI (LNAI), has informed us that their deadline for receiving the proceedings manuscript from is later than previously thought.  So, we haveb... more »

2012-08-01 23:04:07 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

‎[Book] The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment -- table and contributions available on the carboncopies.org page to the book: http://www.carboncopies.org/the-singularity-hypothesis-a-scientific-and-philosophical-assessment

2012-08-01 19:00:11 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

SFN Satellite Symposium on Whole Brain Circuit Reconstruction (Oct. 16, 2012): http://www.carboncopies.org/sfn-satellite-symposium-on-whole-brain-circuit-reconstruction-oct-16-2012

The last few years have seen a rapid increase in the interest in detailed large scale reconstructions of neuronal circuitry identified in human or animal brain tissue. On the structural side, this development is directly related to advances in connectomics, the acquisition of large-scale and high-resolution neural structure and neural connectivity data. On the functional side, recent developments are indicating that neuroscience is ready for a new approach to data acquisition that would provide functional recordings at high spatial and temporal resolution from tens of thousands to millions of neurons.

[...] we need to build the tools, grasp the System Identification problem at the foundation of brain circuit... more »

2012-07-29 12:35:11 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

The updated carboncopies.org page about events at the Singularity Summity Australia, 18-19 August and Ancillary Events 15-17 August: http://www.carboncopies.org/singularity-summit-australia-2012

2012-07-20 15:00:57 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

James Martin's film "The Meaning of the 21st Century" - if you haven't watched it already, perhaps you should! I strongly agree with his multi-disciplinary and broad approach to the great social issues of our time, transhumanism, and the opportunities of our time: http://www.jamesmartin.com/film/watch.cfm

2012-07-16 21:02:07 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

George Church et al call for a large-scale approach to mapping brain function, as was done with the human genome. :-)

http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(12)00518-1?large_figure=true

2012-07-16 15:06:14 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Here's a well-written, and long (!), article that is basically a synopsis of everything that our good friend Kenneth Hayworth has been up to and is up to. :-) http://chronicle.com/article/The-Strange-Neuroscience-of/132819/

2012-07-11 17:59:44 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Recording of the whole Francis Crick Memorial Conference: http://fcmconference.org/watch/

2012-07-08 19:09:37 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I have been live-blogging the Francis Crick Memorial conference (from my perspective, obviously). To see that, see my Facebook wall -- it is all "public", so please let me know if there are any difficulties accessing that data (e.g. for those of you without a Facebook account), as I'm not really familiar with those problems. - If it is a big deal, I will transfer all of that to my WordPress blog site.

2012-07-08 18:20:30 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

D-wave gets into Big-Data: http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/07/quantum-computing-company-d-wave.html

2012-07-04 22:10:56 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

The First Annual Francis Crick Memorial Conference, focusing on "Consciousness in Humans and Non-Human Animals", aims to provide a purely data-driven perspective on the neural correlates of consciousness. The most advanced quantitative techniques for measuring and monitoring consciousness will be presented, with the topics of focus ranging from exploring the properties of neurons deep in the brainstem, to assessing global cerebral function in comatose patients. http://fcmconference.org/

2012-07-04 22:07:59 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

A real friend doesn't let a friend go without coffee! http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/the-case-for-coffee-all-the-latest-research-to-defend-your-caffeine-addiction-in-one-place/259404/#.T_SJ7lV1W3c.facebook

2012-06-28 22:06:10 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

This is very cool stuff! Michael Kahana is quoted in the article and has previously done awesome work together with my former BU colleague Mark Howard on electrode studies that provide evidence for nested oscillations as the mechanism for short-term memory buffers -- which in turn was a large part of my comp. neuroscience modeling work at BU. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21984-implanted-electrodes-offer-clues-to-brains-thesaurus.html

(Original scientific article in the Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.5321-11.2012)

2012-06-26 18:25:05 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

http://www.kurzweilai.net/mind-uploading-featured-in-academic-journal-for-first-time

2012-06-21 04:40:48 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 3 +1s)

Ben Goertzel's introductory editorial and my introductory paper FUNDAMENTALS OF WHOLE BRAIN EMULATION: STATE, TRANSITION AND UPDATE REPRESENTATIONS are now "free access" in the IJMC issue http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmc/

2012-06-21 02:13:58 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 0 +1s)

ATTENTION! If you recently read my post about the great collection of articles about Substrate-Independent Minds, Whole Brain Emulation and Mind Uploading in the special issue of IJMC, and you would like to be able to read all the contributions then please contact me directly by email. I am not interested in dealing with copyright matters by the publishers (who did us all a service by producing this special issue), but I think I may be able to help you individually. (If you need my email address, it is provided in the Contacts section at carboncopies.org.)

2012-06-19 15:16:22 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

The entire issue of the International Journal of Machine Consciousness that was on Whole Brain Emulation is worth reading: http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmc/04/0401/S17938430120401.html

2012-06-15 13:09:07 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH IN WHOLE BRAIN EMULATION: THE NEED FOR INNOVATIVE IN VIVO MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES by Randal A. Koene, now published in IJMC (2012), Vol. 4, Issue 1, pp.35-65. Abstract: Whole brain emulation aims to re-implement functions of a mind in another computational substrate by carefully emulating the function of fundamental components, and by copying the connectivity between those components. The precision with which this is done must enable prediction of the natural development of active states. To accomplish this, in vivo measurements at large scale and high resolution are critically important. We propose a set of requirements for these empirical measurements. We then outline general methods leading to acquisition of a structural and functional connectome, and to the characterization of responses at large scale and high resolution. Finally, we describe two new project developments that tackle... more »

2012-06-15 13:03:04 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

FUNDAMENTALS OF WHOLE BRAIN EMULATION: STATE, TRANSITION AND UPDATE REPRESENTATIONS by Randal A. Koene, now published in IJMC (2012) Vol. 4, Issue 1, pp 5-21. Abstract: Whole brain emulation aims to re-implement functions of a mind in another computational substrate with the precision needed to predict the natural development of active states in as much as the influence of random processes allows. Furthermore, brain emulation does not present a possible model of a function, but rather presents the actual implementation of that function, based on the details of the circuitry of a specific brain. We introduce a notation for the representations of mind state, mind transition functions and transition update functions, for which elements and their relations must be quantified in accordance with measurements in the biological substrate. To discover the limits of significance in terms of the temporal and spatial... more »

2012-06-11 21:02:42 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

http://youtu.be/01hbkh4hXEk

2012-05-23 01:41:43 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2012-05-14 03:03:31 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Critical Thought TV now has a page up that presents all 4 videos of the complete interview Stuart Stuart Mason Dambrot did with me about Substrate-Independent Minds: http://criticalthought.com/critical-thought-tv/critical-thought-tv-randal-koene/

2012-05-09 02:35:30 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

A Window of Opportunity - is the new article that describes the rationale behind SIM, the why as well as the how. The article is based on the talk I gave at TEDxTallinn a few days ago. Here is the article: http://www.carboncopies.org/a-window-of-opportunity

2012-05-09 02:33:44 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

A voice recording of the talk that I gave at TEDxTallin entitled "Machines in Minds to Reverse Engineer the Machine that is Mind" is available at carboncopies: http://www.carboncopies.org/tedxtallinn-introducing-concrete-sim-in-estonia

2012-04-15 00:24:05 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Check out these new articles at http://carboncopies.org/research-projects/references-and-links:
Koene, R.A. (2012). Fundamentals of Whole Brain Emulation: State, Transition and Update Representations, Special Issue of the International Journal on Machine Consciousness, Vol.4, No.1 (pre-print).
Koene, R.A. (2012). Experimental Research in Whole Brain Emulation: The Need for Innovative In-Vivo Measurement Techniques, Special Issue of the International Journal on Machine Consciousness, Vol.4, No.1, (pre-print).
Kozloski, J. and Wagner, J. (2011). An Ultrascalable Solution to Large-scale Neural Tissue Simulation, Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, Vol. 5, No.15.

2012-04-04 05:35:22 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

The SECOND part of my extensive Critical Thought TV interview with Stuart Mason Dambrot. http://youtu.be/s7ddnnqGIUo

2012-04-02 23:19:18 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

For anyone interested, on RIGHT NOW (Live Stream), The Great Brain Mapping Debate at Columbia University: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blogland/2012/apr/02/brain-mapping-live-video-stream-and-web-chat/

2012-03-24 02:40:32 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

The first part of my extensive Critical Thought TV interview with Stuart Mason Dambrot. http://youtu.be/-_xmW3ld1HY