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Major research breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years

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41–50 of 61 posts

Re: Major research breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years

#41
synthetic biology.

here's a fascinating TED talk from craig venter. (if you haven't heard of him, he was instrumental in the human genome project.) http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/6

the part that was new to me was the idea of synthetic bio solving our energy problems.

Re: Major research breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years

#42

Machine translation of language. In 10-15 years time, given improvement and dissemination of the technology, we might massively open up the world's communication. This could be significant as we massively increase the marketplace of ideas and communication.

Are you a MT practitioner? Email me (email in profile).

Re: Major research breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years

#43
post #40
post #34

In 5-10 years, I'd say personal fabrication. In 10-15 years, I'd say perhaps Human Genome

I think he meant last 5 - 10 years?

He is talking about the last 5-10 years... Personal fabrication has been available in a limited form for a few years ago, and Human Genome Project started in... 1990 iirc.

Re: Major research breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years

#44
Almost everything will have a great impact. Alone those small achievements don't have great effect, but together all of this is driving us to singularity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity). Ray Kurzweil had a talk about this on TED (and his books are interesting too).

Re: Major research breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years

#45
post #26

I'm biased: functional MRI We're just now scratching the surface as to how humans derive their intellect from 3.5 pounds of squishy grey stuff. Some questions we'll never have licked, but the future looks good.

I totally agree, even more so considering recent advances in real-time fMRI ( http://paincenter.stanford.edu/research/rtfmristudy.html ), I also nominate EROS ( http://www.answers.com/topic/event-related-optical-signal ) as a revolution in the making. I think it will deliver some huge discoveries in the activity of the human cortex.

Real-time fMRI isn't that different - you just analyze the data on-line rather than after the scan. The most promise for me is millimeter and millisecond resolution with new scanning and analytic techniques. And that keeps getting better and better.

As for EROS (from your link): "Its biggest downside is the inability to detect activity more than a few centimeters deep, but it is a new, relatively inexpensive technique that is not invasive to the test subject."

That's a big problem it will need to overcome to compete.

Re: Major research breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years

#47
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree, even more so considering recent advances in real-time fMRI ( http://paincenter.stanford.edu/research/rtfmristudy.html ), I also nominate EROS ( http://www.answers.com/topic/event-related-optical-signal ) as a revolution in the making. I think it will deliver some huge discoveries in the activity of the human cortex.

Real-time fMRI isn't that different - you just analyze the data on-line rather than after the scan. The most promise for me is millimeter and millisecond resolution with new scanning and analytic techniques. And that keeps getting better and better. As for EROS (from your link): "Its biggest downside is the inability to detect activity more than a few centimeters deep, but it is a new, relatively inexpensive techniqu…

While RT-fMRI is an incremental technological advance (it's just faster data collection with some spiffy signal processing) it hugely broadens the scope of fMRI's usability. The hemodynamic delays of traditional fMRI are atrocious. For the first time fMRI is giving us access to when brain activity happens, which is nearly as importnat as knowing where. If you look at the biofeedback work being done with RT-fMRI you'll see it's extremely exciting.

Also, I don't view the depth restriction of EROS as a very big problem. There are enough mysteries lurking in the top 3 centimeters of your brain to keep academia busy for a hundred years.

Re: Major research breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years

#48
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real-time fMRI isn't that different - you just analyze the data on-line rather than after the scan. The most promise for me is millimeter and millisecond resolution with new scanning and analytic techniques. And that keeps getting better and better. As for EROS (from your link): "Its biggest downside is the inability to detect activity more than a few centimeters deep, but it is a new, relatively inexpensive techniqu…

While RT-fMRI is an incremental technological advance (it's just faster data collection with some spiffy signal processing) it hugely broadens the scope of fMRI's usability. The hemodynamic delays of traditional fMRI are atrocious. For the first time fMRI is giving us access to when brain activity happens, which is nearly as importnat as knowing where . If you look at the biofeedback work being done with RT-fMRI you'…

I don't know about the BOLD delay being "atrocious". We get good temporal resolution and it's getting better and better (hundreds of milliseconds for some paradigms). I agree though - the biofeedback stuff is very exciting.

As for below the first few centimeters, that's where the control network is in mid-brain structures. That's kind of important, and if EROS can't penetrate deeper and with precision it's not likely to be widely adopted.

Re: Major research breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years

#49
post #18

Support vector machines and other practical realizations of statistical learning theory research that began in the 1970s.

Why single out support vector machines? Sure, the kernel trick is neat but there's really nothing about them that stands out above other classification methods. It would make more sense just to say "the field of machine learning".

It's a practical (especially for small to medium sized data sets), effective way of doing machine learning that has a highly sound theory behind it and doesn't require arcane tricks that are rarely or never written down, unlike old-style artificial neural networks.

The interest in kernel methods is proof that there's nothing more practical than a good theory. :)

Re: Major research breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years

#50
post #17

1) Measuring the age of the universe to a few percent ~14 billion years. 2) Determining the dark energy (70%) / dark matter (25%) / regular matter (5%) breakdown of the universe to a few percent. 3) The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Hubble Space Telescope and Wilkinson Probe I'm purposely being biased :)

> Determining the dark energy (70%) / dark matter (25%) / regular matter (5%) breakdown of the universe to a few percent.

Translation: We've figured out in even more detail how we have no idea wtf is going on in the universe

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