A new navigation system with the ability to provide emergency services with the quickest route while at the same time taking stress into account, has been developed by Trung Bui, a PhD candidate at the University of Twente. This dialogue system identifies users’ emotions and has the ability to react to them appropriately.

A dialogue system is an advanced computer system that has been created to communicate with humans using a coherent structure. They are used for information provision with the use of speech, text, haptics, gestures, graphics and other modes of communication, for both output as well as input. An example of a dialogue system would be the speaking computer that provides travel information. Usually, these computers do not take human emotions into consideration, because emotions are very difficult to interpret, especially so for a computer. How can a computer differentiate the raising of the voice, between enthusiasm and anger? It requires a lot more information to figure out which of the two emotions the person has exhibited. It may be easy for human beings to find the difference as they use a lot of other information that is available to them; but the same cannot be said with a computer. For a computer to be able to make this differentiation, it this involves intricate programming.

Bui’s amazing new dialogue system does exactly this – it takes human emotions into account. To achieve this, he used a mathematical technique that was originally developed in the 1960s and controls factory processes. It was called Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). He showed that this can be used to imbibe the user’s emotions into a dialogue system, which had the capability to deal with uncertainties. Although, this method performs better than all others that are in existence, it is limited to small-scale dialogue problems. For larger problems, the method needs a lot of calculating power.

This is the reason Bui developed a strategy that combines the Dynamic Decision Network (DDN) with POMDP. This combination known as the DDN-POMDP, splits dialogue systems into two different levels. They have the ability to make a choice between looking far ahead and checking whether the required calculating power is available.

In order to demonstrate how effective the DDN-POMDP actually is, Bui applied the technique to a navigation system for emergency services that took into account, the stress experienced by the user. This navigation system gets the input from a separate stress module that has the power to assess an emergency worker’s stress levels, taking them into account when the user is communicating with the system. When the stress levels of a user are high, the system smartly anticipates that the user is more prone to make mistakes and will start requesting confirmation for the tasks performed by the user more often than normal.

The important issues that Bui plans on tackling in the future are, scaling up the model with larger state, action and observation for managing problems; to collect and generate artificial and real data to build and train the model well. With all these features, it is not long before computers become our saviors in more ways than one.

Researchers are turning computers into mind readers. They have created a computer that can look at the brain waves or scans and figure out what humans are thinking.

The brain is not exactly unexplored territory. Philosophers have long before pondered on the nature of thought that pulses through our gray matter and even used several serums, polygraphs, lobotomies and hypnotism to find out what the thoughts are.

However, the past few years have seen an extraordinary and unprecedented promise in the field of neurosciences, with scientists scanning the brain to find patterns of emotion and thought, which are the precursors for behavior and learning.

Brain waves are electrical brain activity patterns. This means, that brain cells communicate with each other by using electricity and neurotransmitters, which are chemicals. These brain waves can be altered by thoughts of different planned actions, such as moving a hand without actually moving the hand.

Researchers hope this study will provide a better understanding of how the brain stores information and where, which will in turn help with providing better treatment for people with learning disabilities, language disorders and other neurological diseases.

Tom Mitchell, the lead researcher from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh says, “The question we are trying to get at is one people have been thinking about for centuries, which is: How does the brain organize knowledge? It is only in the last 10 or 15 years that we have this way that we can study this question.”

They used an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging,) which is a high-resolution brain scan that sees the actual brain activity. The computer was calibrated by making nine student volunteers think of 50 different words, by imaging the brain activity. The volunteers were told that when a word is shown to them, they will have to think of its properties. Then they showed the volunteers the words and imaged as each of the nine volunteers thought about the 58 words. This is done to create an average image of one word.

Mitchell said, “We have the program calculate the mean brain activity over all of the words that somebody has looked at. That gives us the average when somebody thinks about a word, and then we subtract that average out from all those images.”

After the training on all the 58 words was completed, the computer was asked to decide which brain image belonged to which word and the computer passed the test in flying colors by identifying the word that belonged to the image.

There are a lot of areas where these mind reading computers can be used. Imagine the plight of people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS,) who are alive and alert but unable to speak or move. This offers new hope to these people, where they may have a chance of communicating with the help of computers that read their minds.

Researchers are very excited at this development and they say the next step is to study the brain activity for phrases.

As researchers probe deeper into the three pound universe in our head, we may very soon be able to implant new memories in the head and write over all the traumas in the fond hope of calming a fractured psyche. How about implanting a chip that makes us proficient in a foreign language or even gives us in-depth knowledge about a subject?

Defining Virtual Reality

Anything that only seems real is considered virtual reality. The term virtual reality may bring to mind bulky helmets and awkward suits, but the virtual reality of today is much more compact than that. Even the latest game system, Nintendo Wii has virtual reality aspects.

Large Scale Virtual Reality

Large scale virtual reality is found throughout society in places you might expect and others you might not. The government uses virtual reality training simulators for military and space maneuvers. Airline pilots use virtual reality to stay brushed up on their flight skills. And kids in your neighborhood can tell you the best places to play virtual reality games.

Many arcades now carry virtual reality games or adventures. These systems are large and might involve a domed area or the helmets of science fiction virtual reality shows. You can now dance, run, shoot, play sports or more inside an alternate universe for a few quarters at a time. For others, they prefer their virtual reality at home.

Virtual Reality at Home

Virtual reality is available at home as well. The Wii from Nintendo has a specialized controller that can be used in a virtual sword fight or as a virtual golf club. Other games independent of the system allow for a virtual experience in any number of games or sports. Virtual reality will continue to grow in popularity and availability and may only be matter of time before we are all off on a grand adventure without ever leaving our chair.