Media Publicity
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BU Electrical and Computer Engineering Research Spotlight
Read Full Article on BU Electrical and Computer EngineeringCELEST members Professor Ajay Joshi, Dr. Massimiliano Versace, Dr. Florian Raudies, graduate student Mahmoud Zangeneh and graduate student Schuyler Eldridge are featured in the BU Electrical and Computer Engineering's Research Spotlight.
The spotlight covers the team's work in "Plastic Neuromorphic Hardware for Autonomous Navigation in Mobile Robots".
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Learning machines: The education of an animat
New ScientistRead Full Article on New ScientistIt starts off as unformed as any other infant, but this virtual rat's knack for learning could take it a long way – perhaps all the way to Mars
In January, Max Versace and Heather Ames were busy with two newborns: their son Gabriel and Animat, a virtual rat.
Like all babies, when Gabriel was born his brain allowed him to do only simple things like grasp, suck and see blurry images of his parents. The rest was up to him. From the first day his body experienced the world, his senses began to respond. He learned to follow a moving object with his eyes, tell red from yellow, and reach for his mother. Over the next couple of years, he will learn to crawl, walk, talk and, eventually, look after himself.
With any luck, Animat's development will follow a similar path. It didn't start with much programming, either. But...
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Does a Virtual Rat Have Feelings?
Slate.comRead Full Article on SlateIn an engaging feature in the New Scientist, Virginia Hughes tells the story of Animat, a virtual rat created as a guinea pig (if you’ll excused the mixed-animal metaphors) for artificial intelligence. Creating robots that can learn from their environments has proved frustrating...
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BU Neuroscience, Building robots that learn
Read Full Article on BU NeuroscienceThe Neuromorphics Lab is researching innovative robot learning-algorithms. Imagine having a cleaning robot that did what no other cleaning robot is currently able to do: learn. It could learn the one place in your house where your dog always loves to wipe his grubby little paws when he comes inside. It could learn that Tuesdays are softball practice, which means a certain trail of dirt leading up to your room.
The keyword here, obviously, is learning. The problem with the conventional approach to robotics is that it requires explicit programming for robots to carry out specific tasks, leading to a lack of autonomous, general purpose artificial intelligence, or AI.
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Silicon Brains
AZoRoboticsRead Full Article on AZoRobotics“We are close to building silicon brains”: If you have even a glancing interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), you would have heard this promise countless times, and seen it broken as often. Even before there were machines, there was the Golem, an animated anthropomorphic being from Jewish folklore, Frankenstein’s monster, created by harnessing the power of lightning. These were to be followed by mechanized robots, HAL, and Skynet, among others.