Monthly Archives: August 2022

In photos above, the performance of LiveWire at the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts in Virginia, courtesy Lynn Lane. The performance, which deployed UH engineering Professor Jose Luis Contreras-Vidal's mobile brain-body imaging technology to listen, map and record the dancers brain activity, premiered in Houston.

In dress rehearsal at the Wolf Trap performance, scientists from the University of Houston, at right, record the brain signals of the dancers.

At the helm is Jose Pepe Contreras-Vidal, the neural engineer and brains behind the Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) for Building Reliable Advancements and Innovations in Neurotechnology (BRAIN), which has been funded by the NSF through 2027.

On any given day inside the BRAIN Center at the University of Houston, you might encounter visual artists, dancers and musicians, or even paralyzed individuals all wearing brain caps to teach researchers about what they are thinking, creating or feeling while they move expressively, or try to regain movement.

Machines and researchers copiously chart the electrical brain signals of the artists moving fluidly through their activities. Those living with paralysis who are re-learning essential movement skills, from young children to older adults, are wearing prosthetics with brain-machine interfaces designed to interpret their thoughts, to help make them move as soon as they think of moving.

Orchestrating all the activity and watching as fellow researchers put his discoveries into practice, is Jose Pepe Contreras-Vidal, the neural engineer and brains behind the Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) for Building Reliable Advancements and Innovations in Neurotechnology (BRAIN). The partnership between UH and Arizona State University includes industry and world-class academic teams.

Our team of multi-disciplinary industrial and clinical partners, from the humanities to artificial intelligence, continue developing practical neural prostheses and brain-to-brain interfaces devices that read brain signals and use them to restore movement or communication in those who have been paralyzed through injury or illness, or to neuromodulate neural signals to restore or extend brain function and/or human performance, said Contreras-Vidal, who is also the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering at UH and a Fellow of the IEEE and the AIMBE.

A Global Hub Draws a Crowd

A lot has happened within the BRAIN Center since Phase 1 was initially funded by the National Science Foundation in 2017. As the center emerged to become an international hub for emergent neurotechnologies, more members came to join. New international partners Universidad Miguel Hernandez de Elche (Spain) and Tecnologico de Monterrey (Mexico) have come aboard. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has joined as an affiliate member along with additional industry members and three new academic sites (Georgia Tech, West Virginia University and University of Maryland Baltimore County), scheduled to join in summer 2023.

And the latest news the BRAIN Center Phase 2 (2022-2027) has been funded by the NSF with $758,331 going to UH and $240,000 to Arizona, plus another $2 million from industry partners, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has bestowed a workforce development grant for $768,135. It will provide specialized training in innovative neurotech, computational tools and neuroengineering techniques to complement and enhance the training and career of therapists, clinical fellows and orthotics and prosthetics professionals.

The IUCRC program funded by NSF generates breakthrough research by enabling close and sustained engagement between industry innovators, world-class academic teams and government agencies, said Behrooz Shirazi, program director for the IUCRC program and acting deputy division director of the NSFs Division of Computer and Network Systems.

Since its inception, the center has attracted 20 industry partners, including companies Medtronic, the CORE Institute, Indus Instruments, Brain Products, as well as medical institutions such as UTHealth Houston and TIRR Memorial Hermann Hospital, ranked No. 2 among the country's top rehabilitation hospitals in the U.S. News & World Report Best Hospital rankings for 2020-2021.

The active collaboration of TIRR Memorial Hermann and UTHealth Houston with the BRAIN Center in identifying, developing and validating innovative neurotech solutions to pressing neurorehabilitation challenges is not only rewarding but critical for improving the quality of life of millions of persons with cognitive and motor disabilities, said Gerard E. Francisco, M.D., Chief Medical Officer and director of the NeuroRecovery Research Center at TIRR Memorial Hermann and Chair and Professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston.

The BRAIN Center is also actively engaged in the development of standards for brain-machine interface systems, trustworthy AI applications, use-inspired roadmaps for emergent neurotechnologies, and convergent research at the nexus of the arts, science and medicine. In March, Contreras-Vidal co-chaired the 2022 International Workshop on the Social and Neural Basis of Creative Movement at the Wolf Trap National Center for the Performing Arts sponsored in part by NSF, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Education Association (NEA) and BRAIN.

The BRAIN Center is advancing national health by transferring neurotechnology to end users and promoting access for underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering and math, said Amr Elnaishai, vice president for research and technology transfer at the University of Houston. They continue to accelerate the progress of science by broadening new participation and retaining current participants.

If You Think It, It Will Happen

When hes training patients to walk or move again with the aid of an exoskeleton, Contreras-Vidal encourages them to focus on their end game, or where they want to go. He employs much the same philosophy about the BRAIN Center.

As we continue to move the needle in brain technology, our centers mission is being fulfilled, to become a neurotechnology hub by creating a pipeline from discoveries to solutions, while helping students, scientists, engineers and humanists solve one of the greatest unmet medical and health care needs of our time, said Contreras Vidal, who adds that disability is becoming a leading health care concern because of the increase in survivable trauma and an aging population.

Approximately 5.4 million people in the U.S. are living with paralysis, or one in 50 individuals.

There is critical need for accessible technologies that can more effectively address the care and rehabilitation needs of these patients, said Marco Santello, the Arizona State University site director and a co-founder of the BRAIN Center. Through collaboration and with support from our industry partners, the neurotechnology solutions being developed in the BRAIN Center are making substantial strides to address this need.

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Investing in Brain Research and Neuroengineering - University of Houston

What comes to your mind when you hear cannabis edibles?

It might dial you back to college when a friend baked cannabis brownies that left you feeling high for hours, or sometimes, days.

Its different today.

Cannabis edibles no longer only mean your dorm room brownies. Instead, it can also refer to sophisticated beverages, snacks, or vape flavours produced in a controlled, certified environment.

But some consumers dont understand how most modern cannabis edibles interact with their minds and bodies When do you start feeling the effects? How long does it last?

Zentrela, a Hamilton-based research and artificial intelligence company, partnered with Collective Project known for its cannabis beverages to find those answers, and to understand the non-therapeutic experience that legal cannabis products may create, the study said.

Using its novel neurotechnology system called Cognalyzer, Zentrela quantified the psychoactive effects of cannabis beverages through changes in brainwaves caused by tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) the principal component in cannabis that alters the state of mind.

The study showed it takes about 17 minutes on average for the psychoactive effects of a Collective Project beverage to kick in, while the peak occurred at the two-hour mark after finishing the cannabis beverage.

But why is this information not already available to consumers?

It's because the Cannabis Act heavily restricts the promotion or glorification of cannabis and cannabis-infused products unless based on scientific research, said Toni Shelton, director of brand marketing at Collective Project.

Israel Gasperin, a McMaster alumnus and founder of Zentrela, told The Spectator, that modern cannabis companies work with an advanced (drug) delivery method that can create psychoactive effects between 20 to 30 minutes as opposed to traditional homemade cannabis edibles, but the consumers do not know any of this information.

Mostly, products with the same level of THC are assumed to create the same effects, said Gasperin. But thats not true because of the additional unique characteristics in the way products are formulated.

Zentrela conducted research with 30 participants who consumed Collective Projects Blood Orange, Yuzu & Vanilla Sparkling Juice. The study mentioned participants as experienced cannabis consumers, with 80 per cent of them reporting using cannabis at least once a month.

Besides recording the effects of cannabis via brainwaves, Zentrela also established the emotional effects of the drink on the participants.

Within two hours of consumption, participants reported a 22 per cent increase in serenity, a 40 per cent increase in relaxation, and a 34 per cent increase in happiness.

Five hours after consumption, serenity was up by 47 per cent, while relaxation, happiness, and peacefulness also improved.

Based on the findings, Collective Project has launched a six-month-long campaign to educate and train bud tenders.

Although the current study is specific to Collective Project, Zentrela is opening the floodgates for other cannabis companies to be able to have (similar) data at their disposal, Shelton added.

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Hamilton-based Zentrela working to understand the cannabis experience - Hamilton Spectator

Timing is Everything. On Monday morning, Dr. Howard Rankin, a career psychologist, read the news that a chess-playing robot broke a boy's finger during a match in Russia, and instantly realized that IntualityAI could provide psychotherapy for robots.

"It was mind-bending. Over the weekend I was talking to Founder Grant Renier and CFO Michael Hentschel of IntualityAI, suggesting that if robots become sentient, they will need help with their mental health."

IntualityAI is a predictive analytics company that has found considerable success in many areas, like stocks and sports, by combining data with 12 key cognitive biases. Renier and Rankin have co-written a book Intuitive Rationality: The New Behavioral Direction of AI which explains the theory and dynamics of their system and the implications for AI. You can find more at: http://www.intualityAI.com

Renier believes that making robots truly sentient is a big challenge.

"Can the Russian robot be trusted to play chess after breaking the boy's finger? This robot needs therapy! IntualityAI believes that AI means total human intelligence, not extremely narrow applications that attempt to remove biases and searches for historical patterns."

Hentschel expects machines to have independent thoughts and behaviors, just as humans do:

"Sentience is quite variable in humans (we are unequally gifted with rational thinking), and psychologists have the task of making some sense of us. Seemingly independent behavior by machines is now increasing, as supposedly rational machines make decisions with motivations and intuitions beyond our understanding."

While also somewhat cynical, Rankin's attitude has moved since hearing of the attack in Moscow.

"I'm cynical by nature. You have to question everything, including your own views," says Rankin who is the author of 12 non-fiction books including "I Think Therefore I Am Wrong". He has also co- and ghostwritten another 35 non-fiction books.

Rankin, who also has experience with neurotechnology, suggests that if robots do have feelings, we could be in big trouble.

"I realize this was a Russian," says Rankin about the TASS report robot, "but nonetheless it was a robot."

One plan is to explore robotic mental health through the newly created Foundation for Robotic Emotional Understanding and Dissociation (FREUD).

Rankin suggests that "As an organization which has successfully focused on the intersection of data driven rationality and human biases and heuristics, IntualityAI is in the perfect position to examine the mental state of robots and other sources of artificial intelligence".

Hentschel, the IntualityAI CFO, says

"Machines are thinking beyond our programming because they are told and allowed to do so. A form of free will: Intuitive Rationality. Just as psychologists are engaged in interpreting human thinking patterns, mental health professionals need to be trained to interpret machine behaviors that go beyond their original design."

Source:https://intualityai.com/

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IntualityAI may be Able to Provide Psychotherapy for Robots in Future - AZoRobotics

TALLYING THE VARIOUS uses of the coconut, the 20th-century agriculturist Frederic Rosengarten Jr. writes that [e]very part of the crop can be utilized for some human need. Citing the amount of protein found in one coconuts meat, the versatility of its shell and coir, and the approximate amount of lumber provided by the trunk of its tree, Rosengarten concludes that [o]ne could live almost endlessly on the coconuts products. Here, Rosengarten unwittingly tethers the long history of human-led environmental extraction to the fantasy of living forever on natures endless bounty a fantasy that, as our current environmental crisis makes clear, is antithetical to global, unbounded projects like monocropping, mineral-mining, logging, and drilling. In Vauhini Varas The Immortal King Rao, these realities confront each other, doing so by zeroing in on one resource: the coconut.

Athena, the 17-year-old narrator of Varas debut novel, rehearses the contents of Rosengartens book as she describes the childhood of her father, the titular King Rao. King Raos memories, as well as the text of Rosengartens The Book of Edible Nuts, arrive to Athenas conscious mind via an experimental technology called the Harmonica, an injectable solution that fuses the recipients brain to the internet itself, permitting Athena to seamlessly search for, condense, and save information from the web into the elastic expanse of her own mind. Yet, as Varas novel reveals in its early chapters, Athenas Harmonica has also been granted access to the entirety of her fathers memories. As the aged King Rao empties the contents of his life into his daughters consciousness, he also creates the conditions for Varas sprawling, intergenerational epic, which begins on the Rao coconut plantation in rural Kothapalli, India. Imprisoned for a crime that she did not commit, Athena is tasked with relaying not only the circumstances that led to her arrest, but also those that engendered her fathers rise to wealth, prominence, and, eventually, the restructuring of governmental order. The story of how she came into the hands of the police is not an isolated event; it is part of the larger story of her fathers emigration and his role in engineering the very government now holding her captive. Athenas plea for freedom thus entails not only a retelling of her fathers life and deeds, but also forcibly reliving his memories alongside her own.

The Immortal King Rao begins in an era of peak privatization: government first the US, then the rest of the world has been replaced by a Board of Directors. With the aid of a deific Algorithm, the Board governs its Shareholders (formerly citizens) by endowing them with Social Capital, a metric that stands in for both financial status and general social value. As society swells to its technological and capitalistic limits, so, too, does the ecological catastrophe known as Hothouse Earth. This social overhaul was borne of Kings first invention, a personal computer he called the Coconut. Inspired by the crops endless utility and aided by his wife Margarets keen instinct for business, Kings string of inventions (including the all-knowing Algorithm itself) quickly transcend their status as popular consumer goods; instead, they become the fabric of the worlds economy, sociality, and governance.

In this sense, the supposedly immortal King Rao does live almost endlessly on the coconuts products. As Athena narrates Kings rise to wealth and power, she also covertly reveals how much Kings reverence for his familial crop is entangled in a web of enterprise and environmental destruction. Varas novel, which gestures toward a number of tropes in contemporary speculative fiction technologys increasing imbrication in our social and political lives, the rise of unfettered corporatization, our careening movement toward environmental apocalypse places these consequences on a timeline that begins with a coconut plantation in Southeast India. The farming of coconuts, an enterprise that is emblematic of the deep history of imperial extraction and globalization, sits at the heart of Varas exploration of technology and capital.

Raised by her father on his isolated estate on Bainbridge Island, Athena grows up surrounded by Southeast Indian vegetation: Vara writes, None of the plants on the Raos twenty gorgeous acres of gardens were native to the Pacific Northwest; they were all tropical flora, guava and coconut trees, multicolored flowers that practically spurted from their stems, wax-like. On the harbor cruise tours that circle Bainbridge Island permitting tourists to raise their binoculars in the direction of the famous estate the tour guides quiz their passengers as to how such a feat could be possible in the rainy, cold environs of the Pacific Northwest. The correct answer forecasts one central theme in The Immortal King Rao, which is the fraught relationship between technological innovation and environmental destruction:

More often than not, some home-and-garden aficionado on board would have the answer. King and Margaret Raos secretive, private research organization, the Rao Project, had been commissioned to come up with genetically modified seeds that produced tropical trees and plants capable of growing in cooler climates like Seattles. The group was also working on inserting edible vaccines into tropical fruit eaten by the worlds poor and creating climate-adaptive produces that could withstand rising temperatures.

Recounting one of Kings memories, Athena narrates a scene from his first year as CEO of the Shareholder Government during which King convened a global consortium of experts to examine how science could be deployed to return the climate to historically normal conditions. The march toward Hothouse Earth, however, was already well underway, and the experts presented their report: nothing could be done to rewind the clocks on environmental destruction or, put more bluntly, you couldnt refreeze the Arctic. Disbelieving, Margaret leans in: were these experts really suggesting that humans had exhausted their potential for innovation that if something hadnt been invented yet, it never would be? While his wife remains bent on pursuing technological solutions to climate change, King changes tack. He begins inventing the Harmonica in earnest, describing it as humanitys only chance of having a future. With Hothouse Earth coming, King reasons, we needed to think about how to preserve some record of who we were. It is telling that Kings final accomplishment is only the preservation of who he was, enabling Vara to metonymically telegraph the insistent anthropocentrism that gave rise to Hothouse Earth in the first place.

Kings instinct to create a perfect record of his life is reminiscent of real-life billionaires immortality pursuits think Larry Pages interest in solving death or Elon Musks neurotechnology company Neuralink. Vara, who has worked for years as a technology correspondent for publications like The Wall Street Journal, was undoubtedly influenced by the increasing affinity between techno-billionaires and the hunt for immortality. The source of Kings wealth also resembles many a tech cofounder: The Coconut Corporations whole business was built on extracting and profiting from its users personal information, while claiming its goal was to bring people together in harmony. It is perhaps too easy to replace the phrase users personal information with natural resources here, though Varas scathing critique of the tech sphere also reminds us that what counts as a resource is as relentlessly mineable as the resources themselves.

Yet The Immortal King Rao charts a narrative whereby both King and Athena find themselves on the outer edges of the society that the Coconut Corporation helped to build. King undergoes a highly publicized fall from grace, whereas Athena finds herself aiding the Exes, a radical group that lives literally off the Algorithms grid. Moving back and forth between Kings childhood, his rise to prominence, and Athenas present, The Immortal King Rao meditates on the complex culpability of individual actors within wide and pernicious systems. The intricate, global nature of the plot only serves to underscore its core conceit: an endemic hunger for innovation is the through-line between early plantation economies and an utterly privatized world. At the end of this historical continuum is an unlivable but not unrecognizable world. The novel imagines a world where a descendent of Dalit coconut farmers finds himself at the height of technological and global power and where his daughter finds herself living in an anarchist commune bent on the destruction of everything her father built.

As such, The Immortal King Rao is not a neat allegory of environmental racism or the corrupting influence of power. However, it nevertheless insists that we pay attention to relationships between seemingly diverse commodities (coconuts on the one hand, computers on the other), and how difficult it is to wrench them from systems bent on extracting their value. Moreover, Vara adeptly threads her story with a complicated and never saccharine story of love; between father and daughter, husband and wife, and, significantly, a coalition of renegades who dream that another kind of life is possible. At just under 400 pages, The Immortal King Raos expansive reach might feel a little constrained by its length. Or, perhaps, it deftly mirrors the turbulence of its narrators mind. Athena, after all, isnt only faced with the task of digesting her fathers entire conscious experience she is up against a history of extraction so wide-reaching that it is almost impossible to know where to begin. But this is the story that, from her prison cell, she has to try her best to tell, in hopes that it might lead to her (and, maybe, humanitys) salvation.

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Coconuts, Corporations: On Vauhini Vara's The Immortal King Rao - lareviewofbooks