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IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

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Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#31

Post by tjmc »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #2

A little fanciful I think. The stuff about generating your own energy through captured kinetic energy is silly. My house has a 20KW feed - thats about 27 horsepower. On my bike I produce a tiny fraction of a horsepower. Its many orders of magnitude off.

Indeed - it's just weird that they're focusing on capturing low grade kinetic energy right when photovoltaic solar is at the tipping point of beating grid power with under a 5 year payback period. Expect (in sunny climates) to see a switch to solar panels on the level that we saw from CRTs to flat panels a few years back.

But the really interesting thing in energy in the next 5 years is going to be price drops in storage. We could conceivably see the first lithium-air batteries for cars, which will finally get costs down to within striking distance of petrol. I also suspect we'll start seeing widespread grid storage installations - possibly using sodium-sulphur batteries to absorb and redistribute inputs from distributed renewable sources. The 2-way grid is the next big story in energy.

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#32

Post by Steko »

lars wrote: post #27

I've recently completed a masters thesis on EEG based mind reading, and I think I have a fairly good grasp on the state of the art in this field. I also have a copy of Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near by my bed, and I'm usually strongly optimistic about technology. But if IBM are talking about EEG based technology here, I would have to bet that they are flat out wrong on this one. I'll explain why. Something like m…

"who I would like to call can not be inferred from the electrical activity on my scalp"

If I read the blog post correctly the claim is not passive mind reading. The claim is that the user has some training to issue the sorts of thought commands that can be reliably picked up. If I think "call mom" it doesn't do anything. But if I think "Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right" maybe it can interpret that correctly as my preassigned shorthand for "call mom".

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#33

Post by kevinalexbrown »

lars wrote: post #27

I've recently completed a masters thesis on EEG based mind reading, and I think I have a fairly good grasp on the state of the art in this field. I also have a copy of Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near by my bed, and I'm usually strongly optimistic about technology. But if IBM are talking about EEG based technology here, I would have to bet that they are flat out wrong on this one. I'll explain why. Something like m…

> I'm easily willing to bet IBM money that who I would like to call can not be inferred from the electrical activity on my scalp. (Seriously IBM, let's go on longbets.org and do this.)

Be more precise. If you can distinguish two classes, you can convey anything through EEG, however slowly (think 'bits'). With error, use error-correcting codes and you can get relatively high accuracy.

Pedantics aside, I agree in sentiment. Even with invasive techniques we can only roughly decode movement.

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#34

Post by derekp7 »

tree_of_item wrote: post #8

"ATM machine" in an IBM video? I'm slightly disappointed.

Would you rather them call it an AT machine? I guess it could be "@machine" in that case. Point being -- if you can't choose which to leave out, then you have only half redundancy -- which is acceptable, if not optimal.

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#35

Post by bgalbraith »

blhack wrote: post #7

Linkbaity headline, there. "Mind reading" already exists kindof sortof maybe good enough to cnet to write an article about. This is at the top of my Christmas list: http://emotiv.com/ In fact, here is a comparison of consumer Brain Computer Interfaces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_consumer_brain%E2...

As a current PhD student working in this area, I caution you about getting too excited about the Emotiv EPOC. We've got one in the lab we've started to work with as a potential low-cost EEG system. The out-of-the-box software is kinda hokey, so you may end up with an expensive novelty you use once or twice.

On the technical side, it does seem to be the best current option for consumer EEG, though most of these devices are actually strongly influenced by, if not heavily reliant on, facial muscle movements.

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#36

Post by troyastorino »

bgalbraith wrote: post #35
blhack wrote: post #7

Linkbaity headline, there. "Mind reading" already exists kindof sortof maybe good enough to cnet to write an article about. This is at the top of my Christmas list: http://emotiv.com/ In fact, here is a comparison of consumer Brain Computer Interfaces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_consumer_brain%E2...

As a current PhD student working in this area, I caution you about getting too excited about the Emotiv EPOC. We've got one in the lab we've started to work with as a potential low-cost EEG system. The out-of-the-box software is kinda hokey, so you may end up with an expensive novelty you use once or twice. On the technical side, it does seem to be the best current option for consumer EEG, though most of these device…

Agreed. Although there are many videos online of using the device successfully, the people who tried it in our lab found it/themselves very difficult to train. And it was due to lack of trying...we very much wanted to control things with our minds.

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#38

Post by ratsbane »

I'm guessing that when mind reading comes it will be more more of a machine learning exercise based on analysis of speech, vocal inflections, visible features, and previous actions than a portable EKG machine with wires on the scalp.

See Poe's detective Auguste Dupin, in, for example, "Murders in the Rue Morgue."

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#39

Post by 6ren »

eurleif wrote: post #28
6ren wrote: post #26

In a sense, speech is mind-reading: you can have in your mind what the writer had in their's. This isn't just sophistry, but shows there are two problems, 1. to transmit information into and out of a mind; 2. to transform the information into a form that can be understood by another. A common language if you will. This has analogues in relational databases, where the internal physical storage representation is transf…

>Otherwise, everyone would communicate with that, instead of inventing common languages. How would we communicate with it? By directly linking our brains together? I don't see why it would have a direct translation into sounds.

You're right, that particular sentence is unnecessary to my argument and weakens it.

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#40

Post by lars »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #33
lars wrote: post #27

I've recently completed a masters thesis on EEG based mind reading, and I think I have a fairly good grasp on the state of the art in this field. I also have a copy of Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near by my bed, and I'm usually strongly optimistic about technology. But if IBM are talking about EEG based technology here, I would have to bet that they are flat out wrong on this one. I'll explain why. Something like m…

> I'm easily willing to bet IBM money that who I would like to call can not be inferred from the electrical activity on my scalp. (Seriously IBM, let's go on longbets.org and do this.) Be more precise. If you can distinguish two classes, you can convey anything through EEG, however slowly (think 'bits'). With error, use error-correcting codes and you can get relatively high accuracy. Pedantics aside, I agree in senti…

Sure. Let's say a five second EEG segment, recorded from up to 200 electrodes. I bet that by 2017 we cannot accurately detect who a person would like to call out of phonebook of 50 people. Specifically, in a setting where each person is as likely to be called (equal prior probability), I bet the detection accuracy will not exceed 4% on average with a phone book of 50 people. I'm talking about the BCI understanding a "call mom" thought, not detecting it through some other means like a movement (though I don't expect that to work by then either).
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