Information can be scary, and even more so when we find ourselves humbled by its immensity. In a press release issued earlier this week, the European Commission has once again demonstrated that it is not afraid of big data. Quite the opposite, Europe is more than ever ready to embrace it – a gesture, which is reflected in Europe’s strong bet on research projects like CEEDs, which uses big data to enhance human cognition and improve problem solving.

In a previous post, we already discussed CEEDs and the eXperience Induction Machine (XIM), the heart of the project, located in the SPECS lab at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. The press release singles out CEEDs as an example of successful and highly promising big data research initiative.

Although XIM has so far mainly been applied to visualising brain (BrainX3) and historical (Bergen-Belsen reconstruction) data and will certainly bring about a huge qualitative change in how scientists work with tremendous amounts of information, the integration of this technology into more down-to-earth application fields seems imminent.

The press release reports that early interest in the XIM technology is already coming from several museums in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the United States, where it could potentially help with gathering and reacting to feedback from visitors. This naturally applies to many other public spaces such as shops, libraries and concerts. The CEEDs team is also conducting negotiations with several public, charity and commercial organisations to further extend the scope of application of the platform.

The CEEDs project coordinator Jonathan Freeman, Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London pointed out that “anywhere where there’s a wealth of data that either requires a lot of time or an incredible effort, there is potential.” In science, whole disciplines, from satellite imagery inspection to oil prospecting and astronomy, could benefit immensely from this novel approach to processing information.

With projects like CEEDs, Europe is working its way towards a new data-driven economy, a long-time goal, which the European Commission is now actively promoting across national governments. The European approach towards big data is perhaps best expressed in the words of the vice-president of the European Commission Neelie Kroes: “Big data doesn’t have to be scary. Projects like this enable us to take control of data and deal with it so we can get to solving problems. Leaders need to embrace big data.”

You can also read this article to learn about some other exciting big data projects backed by the European Commission.

Year by year, robots become better and better at negotiating each time more complex social interactions with humans. However, much as their social intelligence has improved, these interactions still suffer from a lack of transparency. In other words, unlike humans, robots are not capable of understanding and explaining their actions in intentional terms, which prevents them from having more effective communication with humans. To the joy of robots and humans alike, this challenge is now addressed by the What You Say Is What You Did (WYSIWYD) project, launched earlier this year.

The project, coordinated by the SPECS lab at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, will develop an autobiographical memory that can store data streams obtained by the robot in the form of a consistent personal narrative of the interaction history. Furthermore, the researchers intend to devise a mechanism of conversion of this memory data into meaningful linguistic structures that can be subsequently expressed in speech and communicative actions through a specific channel dubbed WYSIWYD Robotese, thus improving mutual understanding between robots and humans.

WYSIWYD is an interdisciplinary effort that will draw from the fields of robotics, cognitive science, psychology and computational neuroscience. The project largely builds on the previous success of the efAA project, also coordinated by SPECS. WYSIWYD is scheduled to run for 3 years, and hopefully will bring about a qualitative change in human robot interaction and cooperation as well as unlock new application areas in robotics.

The main research platform for the project is everybody’s favourite iCub robot, developed by the Italian Institute of Technology in Milan, which is also one of the universities participating in the collaboration. iCub will be used in combination with another amazing piece of technology Reactable, an interactive table interface.

iCub has recently celebrated its 10^th anniversary. Watch the video below to see how the robot and its capabilities evolved throughout a decade.

Running this year from September 2nd to September 13th, BCBT will provide students with the unique opportunity to attend lectures by prominent scientists in the fields of cognitive science and technology, as well participate in hands-on tutorials while working towards their own final project.

BCBT is organized and supported by the European project CSN (Convergent Science Network of Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems) and this year is also supported by Goal Leaders (biologically-constrained architectures for the next generation of adaptive robots). You can find out more about the previous editions of BCBT HERE.

Don’t miss your chance to sign up now — see you there!

Electro sensors inspired by fish who navigate their way through murky waters, robots that dance with the honeybees, and artificial muscles and blood vessels making their way into modern medicine. These are just a few of the research topics that were discussed at this year’s Living Machines Conference that took place from 9th to the 12th of July in Barcelona, Spain.

Chairs of the session  Paul Verschure, from Pompeu Fabra University and Tony Prescott from the University of Sheffield, welcomed delegates to one of Barcelona’s architectural gems; Antoni Gaudí’s La Pedrera building.

During 4 consecutive days, leading scientists in the fields of Biomimetics and Biohybryd systems gathered for pre-conference workshops, lectures, poster sessions, exhibitions and open panel sessions to present their work and discuss issues related to the development of real-word technologies inspired by biological systems.

The first day finished off with a panel-lead discussion centred on the question: why study nature? Co-chair Tony Prescott got dialogue flowing by providing two general reasons: to build technologies that could be useful in solving current challenges, and to better understand nature itself.  While the speakers and audience engaged in the discussion agreed that these are likely the main motives, other interesting opinions surged through out the conversation.

According to Barry Trimmer who specializes in Neurobiology at the University of Tufts,  by attempting to understand nature’s complexity, a biomimetic approach may allow us to bypass the limits of human creativity.

Toshio Fukuda who specializes in Micro-Nano Systems Engineering at Nagoya University is often inspired by particular functions or geometric shapes found in nature to help make devices such as the artificial blood vessels he works on more efficient.

Conversely, as a mechanical engineer specialized in aerodynamics, David Lentink  is not so much interested in biomimetics as an outfit for a design, but rather in specific principles which might make sense from an engineering point of view ¨ We don’t want to look at the final detail of a bird wing to make an aircraft because it’s simply too complex, but some of the principles are extremely useful and they allow scientists to really think outside the box.¨

While a biomimetic approach often involves studying some of the most puzzling aspects of nature scientists have yet to wrap their heads around, there are still many things nature can’t do. ¨ Biological systems satisfy many constraints at one time so they may not be optimal for any one function that we may want to imitate. Flight is a great example because we can do things by optimizing that birds just can’t do and we can exceed the capabilities of birds with jets and planes that we build,¨explained Frank Grasso, director of the Biomimetic and Cognitive Robotics lab at Brooklyn College, New York.

However, Dieter Braun, who specializes in Systems Biophysics at Ludwig Maximilians University, pointed out that it’s really a two-way learning stream and just because ¨evolution did not invent the bicycle¨ nature still has plenty of tricks to teach us and we need not be afraid of its complexity.

Check back to find out more on what what was shared during the 2012 Living Machines Conference; proceedings from the conference will be published in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNAI/LNCS).