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Category: mapping – Page 30

Will Robot Window Washers Replace The Person Hanging Outside My Window With a Squeegee and Pail?

The need for window-washing humans or robots, therefore, is only going to get bigger in 21st-century cities around the world.

Ozmo combines a flexible robotic arm, artificial intelligence, machine learning and computer vision to clean building facades. It has onboard sensors that can adjust the pressure needed based on the type and thickness of the glass. Onboard LiDAR maps the building facades it is working on in three dimensions. As it moves it calculates its cleaning path hundreds of times per second while adapting to variable external environments by using onboard machine learning. Windy conditions pose no threat. And no humans are at risk as it allows for remote control operations by a handler should Ozmo need to be shut down.

HBP researchers identify three new human brain areas involved in sexual sensation, motor coordination, and music processing

HBP researchers from Germany performed detailed cytoarchitectonic mapping of distinct areas in a human cortical region called frontal operculum and, using connectivity modelling, linked the areas to a variety of different functions including sexual sensation, muscle coordination as well as music and language processing.

The study contributes to the further unravelling of the relationship of the human brain’s structure with function, and is the first proof-of-concept of structural and functional connectivity analysis of the frontal operculum. The newly identified cytoarchitectonic areas have been made publicly available as part of the Julich-Brain Atlas on the EBRAINS platform, inviting for future research to further characterise this brain region.

Based on cell-body stained histological sections in ten postmortem brains (five females and five males), HBP researchers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and Research Centre Jülich identified three new areas in the frontal operculum: Op5, Op6 and Op7. Each of these areas had a distinct cytoarchitecture. Connectivity modelling showed that each area could be ascribed a distinct functional role.

Algorithms Can Learn, And They Probably Should: Saving Resources For The Future

What you get, starting out in this video, is that algorithms impact our lives in, as CSAIL grad student Sandeep Silwal puts it, “silent ways”

Silwal uses a simple example – maps – in discussing what he calls the “marriage of provable algorithm design and machine learning.”

Lots of people, he notes, want to move from the area around MIT, south across the Charles to Fenway Park, to see the Red Sox.

That sort of fact could inform the thinking about how to program algorithms. For example, Silwal mentions how you can analyze data results to identify the most visited websites on the Internet – and direct focus accordingly.

“We use (algorithms) to compute fundamental things about us,” he says. “And… More.

First comprehensive maps of infant brains reveal clues to neurodevelopment

Scientists have constructed a comprehensive set of functional maps of infant brain networks, providing unprecedented details on brain development from birth to two years old.

The infant brain cortex parcellation maps, published today in eLife, have already provided novel insights into when different brain functions develop during infancy and provide valuable, publicly available references for early brain developmental studies.

Cortical parcellation is a means of studying brain function by dividing up cortical gray matter in different locations into “parcels.” Scans from imaging (fMRI) are taken when the brain is in an inactive “resting” state, alongside measurements of brain connectivity, to study brain function within each parcel.

Century-Old Paradigm Overturned — Brain Shape Matters More Than Neural Connectivity

For over a hundred years, scientists have held the belief that our thoughts, feelings, and dreams are shaped by the way various brain regions interact via a vast network of trillions of cellular connections.

However, a recent study led by the team at Monash University’s Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health has examined more than 10,000 distinct maps of human brain activity and discovered that the overall shape of an individual’s brain has a much more substantial impact on our cognitive processes, emotions, and behavior than its intricate neuronal connectivity.

The study, recently published in the prestigious journal, Nature draws together approaches from physics, neuroscience, and psychology to overturn the century-old paradigm emphasizing the importance of complex brain connectivity, instead identifying a previously unappreciated relationship between brain shape and activity.

Scientists use chemical mapping to study the spiraling arms of the Milky Way

A researcher has used the technique of chemical mapping to study the spiral arms of our home galaxy: the Milky Way. According to Keith Hawkins, assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin, chemical cartography might help us better grasp the structure and evolution of our galaxy.

“Much like the early explorers, who created better and better maps of our world, we are now creating better and better maps of the Milky Way,” mentioned Hawkins in an official release.

NASA/JPL-Caltech.

According to Keith Hawkins, assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin, chemical cartography might help us better grasp the structure and evolution of our galaxy.