Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

New insight into how brains process visual information is a double edged sword. It will make for much better vision engines but with that will come the failure of our most popular human test at the moment — captcha.

Using a fly, whose brain is heavily coded for visual information, Nemenman and his colleagues were able to show information is passed along the spikes in the fly’s brain neurons.

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Nemenman and his colleagues’ research is significant because it re-examines fundamental assumptions that became the basis of neuromimetic approaches to artificial intelligence, such as artificial neural networks. These assumptions have developed networks based on reacting to a number of impulses within a given time period rather than the precise timing of those impulses.

“This may be one of the main reasons why artificial neural networks do not perform anywhere comparable to a mammalian visual brain,” said Nemenman, who is a member of Los Alamos’ Computer, Computational and Statistical Sciences Division. “In fact, the National Science Foundation has recognized the importance of this distinction and has recently funded a project, led by Garrett Kenyon of the Laboratory’s Physics Division, to enable creation of large, next-generation neural networks.”

New understanding of neural function in the design of computers could assist in analyses of satellite images and facial-pattern recognition in high-security environments, and could help solve other national and global security problems. [ read more Language of a fly proves surprising ]

Papers:
PLoS: Neural Coding of Natural Stimuli: Information at Sub-Millisecond Resolution

More information:
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