Abstract

The biggest scientific challenge humans face is to understand the mind and brain. This quest is also of great practical relevance. Already the 1 mm3 brain of the bee shows feats of navigation, learning and communication that is beyond the current state of the art in robotics.
In our work we take the view, derived from the 17th century philosopher Vico, that we should validate our theories of the mind/brain in practical construction. Hence, from this perspective we should be able to construct artificial mind/brain systems and repair existing - biological - ones or, in other words, build a cyborg. In order to construct a cyborg such as Ghost in the Shell's Motoko Kusanagi or Robocop, we will need at least three core ingredients: 1) hybrid electronic-biological interface systems, 2) methods to define and shape the functional properties of neuronal systems and 3) a theory on how the components of the system should be integrated into one consistent architecture. In this talk I will describe current efforts to develop these three core concepts and technologies required to construct a cyborg. Specifically, I will define the Distributed Adaptive Control (DAC) neuromorphic architecture (1,2) that proposes how different levels of the neuraxis - from the brainstem to the cerebral cortex - interact to give rise to perception, cognition and action. DAC in turn has given rise to novel hypotheses on perception (3) and action. In particular, I will discuss a neuroprosthetic device, or silicon cerebellum (4), for the replacement of discrete learning functions of the brain. Lastly I will discuss novel approaches for cognitive neurorehabilitation that show how we can induce functional reorganization of the central nervous system through multi-modal interactive stimulation.

 

Paul Verschure
Laboratory for Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems - SPECS
Institute of Audiovisual Studies/Technology Dept.
ICREA & Universitat Pompeu Fabra 

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