What’s the relationship between living and artificial systems? How can we combine the two to form sophisticated solutions to challenges in science and engineering? The annual conference Living Machines puts these questions under the microscope.

Conference chairs Paul Verschure (Director of the Synthetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems Group at Pompeu Fabra University) and Tony Prescott (Director of the Sheffield Centre for For Robotics, University of Sheffield ) hosted the 2013 events July, 29 – August, 2 at the Natural History Museum in London, a venue no less enchanting than last year’s edition which took place at Antonio Gaudi’s La Pedrera in Barcelona.

In addition to the workshops and the international roster of plenary speakers, this year’s conference featured a special exhibition on Living Machines at the London Science Museum.  Intelligent artifacts and biohybrid art made up the majority of installations displayed. Some of the stranger-than-fiction highlights included: a live musical performance featuring a humanoid robot; a robot model of ‘trace’ fossils from the dawn of life; music composed by a bio-inspired computer programme that mimics natural selection; plant-like robots that grow and change shape; wearable computing for finding your way in darkness and a robot that powers itself by digesting insects.

The fascinating exhibition complemented captivating talks on Natural and Artificial Selves by University of California Berkeley’s Tarrence Deacon; Biomimetics for medical devices by Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena from Imperial College London; the history of living machines by Andrew Pickering from the University of Exeter, and several others.

Stay tuned for the Convergent Science Network’s next edition of Living Machines, coming up in the summer of 2014! To read more about the 2013 event click HERE.

A new way to get meaningful info from minute creatures

Although not known for its beauty or its brains, the common fruit fly has won the devotion of scientists around the world thanks to its many traits that make it an excellent research subject.

The Drosophila melanogaster is already well known for being used in genetics research – in fact, these little guys can even provide us with important insights into the brain mechanisms underlying cognitive processes like learning and memory.

It has become increasingly popular to study the fruit flies’ olfactory system. By manipulating the genes of these flies, we can learn more about how odors are perceived by the brain and even how they can influence behaviour.

However, this type of research can be tricky business.  Currently, olfactory driven fly
behavior is mostly investigated in mass experiments using  apparatus such as the T-maze, where large groups of flies are asked to choose between one odorant and a control. For a variety of validity issues, using this kind of methodology  often produces biased results while also leaving researchers short of finding the data they are really looking for.

To remedy these issues, researchers from The Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, in Germany; The Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute and The Sythetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems group (SPECS), University Pompeu Fabra, in Spain, have created a new model to study olfaction in the fruit fly…. While the latest fashions grab attention on the Catwalk, researchers working with fruit flies may start turning their heads towards the Flywalk!

The Flywalk consists fifteen small aligned wind tunnels where individual flies can be exposed to repeated odor pulses, well defined in concentration and timing. The flies’ positions can also be visually tracked, which allows quantification of the odor-evoked walking behavior with high temporal resolution.

By using the Flywalk, researchers were able to show that the flies’ behavior is odorant-specific; attractive odors elicited upwind movements, while repellent odors evoked downwind movements. Furthermore, researchers were able to demonstrate that these changes in behavior differ between sexes and that flies can evaluate the sex of others around them and males can even determine a female’s mating status based on olfactory cues.

If you’d like to find out more about this, you can access the full paper published in Nature.

The Spanish Society of Neuroscience, has declared 2012 Neuroscience Year in Spain. The year-long celebration serves as a way to bring neuroscience to the public and promote the dissemination of scientific knowledge ; a series of exhibitions, conferences, and a variety of other events have been taking place around the country throughout the year.

Here’s a taste of what was featured last month at the Fabra y Coats creation space in Barcelona, Spain– members of the Synthetic Perceptive Emotive and Cognitive Systems Lab (SPECS)  from Universitat Pompeu Fabra  displayed some of their latest innovations and talked about their recent work:

Trying out the RGS

Later on, Armin Duff talked about plasticity and the brain  followed by Belén Rubio Ballester who explained how the Rehabilitation Gaming System (RGS) is used with stroke patients.  Visitors were busy trying it out all day!

Interactive 3D brain imaging

The ¨emotion machine¨caught the eye of many passers by: Sylvain Legroux and Fabio Rotondi were present to help participants experience personalized multimedia through a multimodal system that can detect responses from physiological and behavioral measures while being linked to musical instruments and  a real-time graphics system called SMuSe composition.

Fotios Balampanis with a flying robot

Of course, few SPECS demos would be complete without robots! A chemical sensing robot roamed around the ground while a flying saucer-like bot took visitors by surprise as it hovered in mid air.

The evening session drew a large crowd, featuring talks by leading scientists in the field, Paul Verschure, director of the SPECS Lab at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra  and Robert Zatorre, director of the The Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Paul Vershure, director of the SPECS lab, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

The audience was given an idea of how long musical instruments have been a part of human culture when they were shown a collection of 35,000 year old flutes fashioned out of vulture bones.

Robert Zatorre discussed some of the effects that Music has on the human brain… does it act somewhat like a drug? And, why does it make us want to dance?  Paul Verschure then lead the audience to ponder the concept of creating music without instruments… music created directly through our brains.

To find out about more  activities and events related to the year of Neuroscience in Spain click HERE

The event is being celebrated from the 12th -26th of October to mark the  the millennium of the Kingdom of Granada. With over 600 experts  from 22 countries of the
Mediterranean basin, the event is a unique international experience
that is focused on highlighting  emerging talent and innovation within Mediterranean countries  and the important role of ICT towards sustainable economic development. The event also aims to foster  international cooperation, respect for human rights, and the overcoming of cultural barriers.

What does icub have to do with this?  icub was present with Paul Verschure from the SPECS lab (Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems) at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.The SPECS lab is involved in several European projects that are currently using the icub and other robots as a platform to study the mind and brain. Verschure and icub were also there to present the FET Flagship initiative Robot Companions for Citizens, an ambitious initiative which aims to promote our sustainable welfare through the creation of sentient machines.

Check out the links on some of the other European projects SPECS is involved in:

EFAA Experimental Functional Android Assistant:a project that contributes to the development of socially intelligent humanoids

SMCS Extending Sensorimotor Contingencies to Cognition: a project that aims to establish computational models  as controllers for autonomous robots and investigate learning and adaptivity in in artificial systems

 GOAL-LEADERS Goal-directed, Adaptive Builder Robots: a project which aims to develop biologically-governed  frameworks for the next generation of adaptive service robots.

Visual art, music and dance allow people to express their emotional experiences and put them on display for others. By using their bodies people produce masterpiece paintings, play glorious symphonies or put on amazing dance recitals but what would happen if we took our bodies out of the equation? This is what the Multimodal Brain Orchestra created by the Synthetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems (SPECS) group at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona wanted to investigate.

The piece which was performed for the first time at the 2009  Science Beyond Fiction conference in Prague, maintained an underlying structure composed by Jonatas Manzolli, however, members of the orchestra were fitted with caps which were recording their EEGs (electroencephalographs used to record electrical activity in the brain). Specifically marked changes in brain waves were then translated into musical notes and displayed on a screen producing an incredible visual and auditory experience for its audience. The orchestra also involved the use a conventional conductor, who would direct the attention of orchestra members to different stimuli and an ¨emotional conductor¨who was being shown images by artist Behdad Rezazadeh while her EEG readings, heart rate and skin conductance were being measured and displayed.

As director of the Multi Modal Brain Orchestra, Paul Verschure has been involved in other fascinating research that involves the application of biological models of perception, learning, behaviour and problem solving to differents areas of robotics, interactive spaces and avatars. Paul is also a current member of the Coordination Action of the Robot Companions for Citizens FET Flagship Initiative.

You can read more about this in an article by the BBC