Hawking, the best-selling author of A Brief History Of Time, who suffers with Motor Neurone disease, currently uses his computer to speak by twitching a muscle on his cheek. Each movement is then detected by an optical sensor mounted on his glasses, which allows him to choose letters and words on a computer screen.
He will now be working with a team from Intel to find a way to express himself after a deterioration in his health made it more difficult for him to operate his computer. Continue reading →
“Jedis, not Cylons: Changing the relationship between humanity and technology”. Deepa Iyengar, co-founder and CEO at MindGames, talks about people’s relationship with technology and where it could be heading.
Since 2006, IBM has published an annual end-of-year forecast called the “Five in Five,” a list of five technological innovations the company thinks will change the way people live and work in the next five years. This year’s forecast contains mind-reading mobile phones.
Scientists are developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) that recognises a person’s affective state and plays music to them based on their mood.
Scientists from the universities of Reading and Plymouth believe the system could be used as a therapeutic aid for people suffering with certain forms of depression. The project would use an electroencephalograph (EEG) to transfer the electrical signal from the patient’s scalp via a series of wires to an amplifier box, which, in turn, would be connected to a computer. The computer would then generate its own synthetic music based on the user’s mental state.
The researches have developed a number of rule-based approaches to generate music with computers. They will use computer software to try to identify rules governing musical patterns that produce certain emotions. Then we would embed these rules into the system to generate the music.