For all the improvements in computer technology over the years, we still struggle to recreate the low-energy, elegant processing of the human brain. Now, researchers at Stanford University and Sandia National Laboratories have made an advance that could help computers mimic one piece of the brain's efficient design -- an artificial version of the space over which neurons communicate, called a synapse. "It works like a real synapse but it's an organic electronic device that can be engineered," sa…

Autonomous driving, automatic speech recognition, and the game Go: Deep Learning is generating more and more public awareness. Scientists at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and their partners at ETH Zurich and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now used it to determine the development of hematopoietic stem cells in advance. In Nature Methods they describe how their software predicts the future cell type based on microscopy images. Today, cell biology is no longer limited to static state…

A clinical research publication led by Stanford University investigators has demonstrated that a brain-to-computer hookup can enable people with paralysis to type via direct brain control at the highest speeds and accuracy levels reported to date. The report involved three study participants with severe limb weakness -- two from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called Lou Gehrig's disease, and one from a spinal cord injury. They each had one or two baby-aspirin-sized electrode arrays placed i…

A team of researchers has developed a new computer-assisted recognition system that can identify individual lemurs in the wild by their facial characteristics and ultimately help to build a database for long-term research on lemur species. The scientists hope this method has the potential to redefine how researchers track endangered species in the wild. The recognition system, LemurFaceID, identifies individuals based on photographs, which helps researchers build a database of lemurs in Madagasc…

Sports analytics -- tracking how fast the ball is moving or how players move across the field -- is becoming a key component of how coaches make decisions and fans view games. Data for these analytics is currently sourced through cameras in stadiums and courts and is incredibly expensive to acquire. In an effort to make big data analytics more accessible for the sports industry, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have utilized IoT devices -- low-cost sensors and radi…

A machine learning algorithm designed to teach computers how to recognize photos, speech patterns, and hand-written digits has now been applied to a vastly different set of data: identifying phase transitions between states of matter. This new research, published today in Nature Physics by two Perimeter Institute researchers, was built on a simple question: could industry-standard machine learning algorithms help fuel physics research? To find out, former Perimeter Institute postdoctoral fellow …

When computers independently identify bodies of water and their outlines in satellite images, or beat the world's best professional players at the board game Go, then adaptive algorithms are working in the background. Programmers supply these algorithms with known examples in a training phase: images of bodies of water and land, or sequences of Go moves that have led to success or failure in tournaments. Similarly to how our brain nerve cells produce new networks during learning processes, the s…

Although we spend a lot of our time online nowadays -- streaming music and video, checking email and social media, or obsessively reading the news -- few of us know about the mathematical algorithms that manage how our content is delivered. But deciding how to route information fairly and efficiently through a distributed system with no central authority was a priority for the Internet's founders. Now, a Salk Institute discovery shows that an algorithm used for the Internet is also at work in th…

Every other year, the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling hosts a competition in which computer systems designed by conference participants try to find the best solution to a planning problem, such as scheduling flights or coordinating tasks for teams of autonomous satellites. On all but the most straightforward problems, however, even the best planning algorithms still aren't as effective as human beings with a particular aptitude for problem-solving -- such as MIT stu…

The comparison of different languages is a core task of historical linguistics. Language comparison allows linguists to trace the development of languages over thousands of years, long before writing systems or written records testified to the existence of languages. Words like tooth in English, Zahn in German, dente in Italian, and dent in French all go back to the same ancestor. Just as biologists reconstruct extinct species, and archaeologists reconstruct ancient societies, linguists can reco…