Surprising facts from the video:

1. 23andme co-founder Anne Wojcicki is married to Google co-founder Sergei Brin
2. Data portability is already available. According to the video, users can download the raw data from the 580,000 SNP array and do whatever they want with it.
3. The SNP array is 580,000 SNPs! Wow. I assumed that the number of genetic features was on the order of 100-1000, giving a rough haplotype.
4. Sharing/Web 2.0 features: The real power is 23andwe, an effort to data mine and leverage the power of a large database with many people’s genetic information. The founders mention that they want to contribute back to science and healthcare by surveying their customers behaviors and medical issues to uncover further correlations with genes. Like Facebook, the service becomes more valuable and more informative as the network grows.

Description of the talk from Google:

The 23andMe Personal Genome Service offers customers a glimpse at their own DNA sequence, a 750-megabyte string that functions as the operating system for a human being. Common variations in this code can influence the structure and function of the associated wetware in predictable ways. Some of these variations and their effects on traits such as athletic talent, pain sensitivity and avoidance of errors will be discussed in reference to three well-documented examples.

“SPECT scans are not sufficiently sensitive or specific to be useful in the diagnosis of A.D.,” neurologist Michael Greicius , who runs the Stanford University memory clinic, and has a special interest in the use of functional brain imaging in the diagnosis of A.D., tells me. “The PBS airing of Amen’s program provides a stamp of scientific validity to work which has no scientific validity.”

Continued pontification on neuroethics issues after the jump.

Looking at Amen’s website, you can find all sorts of “neuro supplements” (many of them seem to be similar to basic multivitamins, probably not harmful but not really neuro treatments in any specific way) and more intriguing products like the $4.95 online Amen Brain System Test which “is a valuable tool to help determine if there are problems in the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate gyrus, basal ganglia, temporal lobes or deep limbic system.” Really? Anterior cingulate? Deep limbic system? Hmmm.

Although people are certainly getting duped by Amen who is out for a quick buck, he is likely indicative of a larger trend. Namely, cashing in on the public’s desire to apply modern neuro research to improving their own health. (After all, that is how/why a lot of neuroscience is funded.) Some of this type of stuff is legitimate and that’s fine, but a lot of it won’t be. How could Amen get promoted through many “respectable” media outlets? Didn’t anyone try to check out his claims? Amen’s response to the critical Salon article makes no headway in providing scientific support for his treatment. As Stephen Colbert might say, his response smacks of truthiness. Where are the neuroethicists and neuroscientists on this one? Shouldn’t they be complaining to the news outlets and reminding them of their duty to fact-check the reports made on their shows? And yes, I mean interviewed guests too. General popularity should not be conflated with scientific approval. People who make scientific claims need to be checked on!

This issue seems to be a pertinent one these days, as demonstrated by this front page NYT article (NYT, login) on the absurd use of ex-military as news analysts and their propagandistic use by the Pentagon. Truthiness seems to be all the rage right now. Let’s hope facts come back into the picture before bad neuroscience leaves a lasting bad impression.

On a more positive note, I’d be curious to hear any opinions on what kinds of products based on preliminary results from neuro research should be allowed and how the scientific community can become more active in approving what’s good and what’s not. I do think that we will soon have many neuroscience entrepreneurs and not all of them are going to have PhDs. What products can be trusted? Maybe we need a forum for reviewing and rating these products — even one based on feedback from users. Ideas?

Download MP3It’s hard to judge the merits of this particular interface but I’m sure this is just the first of many such devices that we’re about to see (demo starts 2:00):

This is an Emotiv headset. More than the gaming application, I like the idea of using it for IM emoticons.

Anyone know if the consumer version will require gel for the scalp electrodes? Hmmm… if gamers are the target audience, I think I have a good idea for a cross-promotional opportunity here.

If there’s one lesson to be learned from almost 60 years of AI research it’s almost certainly to be skeptical of anyone who says they have found THE ANSWER to producing human-level intelligence from computers. Even in the face of this, however, I am intrigued by a new company’s approach to developing Artifical General Intelligence (AGI), a term which is meant to indicate Strong AI rather than Weak AI. That’s probably because its founder, Ben Goertzel, manages to skillfully walk the tightrope between staying conservative about how much they can realistically accomplish and still managing to inspire hope that their methodology has the potential to get close to AGI.

This is best demonstrated in a recent talk that Goertzel gave at Google on his approach to AGI. His company, Novamente, has entered the interesting niche market of “creating intelligent agents for virtual worlds and MMOGs.” If you are surprised that a market exists for such a thing, you aren’t alone, but the company boasts a client list including “Northrop-Grumman, the NIH Clinical Center, the CDC, Global Health Exchange, CACI, Object Sciences Corporation, Zero Degrees, Think Passenger and [the] Electric Sheep Company.” The basic idea is to use the embodied intelligence approach in simulated environments to construct virtual agents that progress through stages of cognitive development.

After spending some time on Second Life (only to cancel my premium account after the unfortunate but inevitable gambling ban), I can almost see how a company might finance itself in the short term by selling Eliza-like virtual pets and automated shopkeepers to Second Life citizens (after all, Sony’s now defunct AIBO project managed to finance such an endeavor for real world virtual pets). What’s more interesting is that the advent of massively multiplayer virtual worlds provides a novel opportunity to access limitless amounts of training data from humans for a virtual agent..the kind of thing that researchers building real world robots have to recruit undergraduates to get. Taking advantage of this resource for the purposes of AI is a good idea, and the incentive structure of the company is such that incremental improvements in the intelligence of their agents ought to translate to greater profits. Anyone who figures out how to drive AI research with a short-term profit motive (rather than vague promises of long-term profit) gets my attention.

Goertzel’s presentation is notable for its modesty. He acknowledges the classic problems of the AI enterprise, like the habit of promising AI algorithms failure to scale up due to combinatorial explosion, and of AI presentations, like hiding inconvenient details behind complex Powerpoint presentations. Refreshingly, he makes fun of these bad patterns as cliches to reassure the audience that he wants to avoid falling into these traps. It pays off, and he wins my respect for doing so. He lays out some of the details of his architecture, but my attention is drawn more to his basic philosophy and approach more than anything else. He makes some interesting points about combinatorial complexity of AI programs, and, in the QA period, offers his views on competing architectures like that of Jeff Hawkins at Numenta.

The other thing I like about Novamente is that they sponsor a research institute called the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, whose goals are roughly the same as Novamente, but not for profit. Clearly there’s a conflict of interest here, but again, in the name of progress I’m willing to accept that. The institute is the organizing hub of Novamente’s ‘in silico embodiment’ virtual environment, AGISim, which is built on the Crystal Space 3D game platform and is open source. Unfortunately, real newtonian physics integration is still on the to do list, making AGISim more limited of a platform that Breve. But then again, AGISim is being built specifically as an environment to integrate with the Novamente Cognition Engine (their ‘brain’), and as such is already more customized for creating environments for cognitive agents.

My biggest critique of this approach is that Novamente doesn’t seem to be integrating enough of brain science into its work. This is revealed in Goertzel’s writings for the fringe journal, Dynamical Psychology, edited by Goertzel himself. The goals of the journal are quite good, to understand “the patterns by which psychological processes unfold through time [and] the emergent, persistent structures which arise as a consequence of this unfolding”. However, not being grounded in neuroscience leads Goertzel and others to describe psychological processes with impenetrable statements like the following:

There are elegant abstract-algebraic symmetries lurking within the social substructures of the self. The internal structure of the self may well be that of a tetrahedral mirrorhouse and related more complex packing structures; and the Fulleresque vision of an iterating dynamical system of adjacent tetrahedral mirrorhouses may well be an accurate model of critical aspects of the emergent cognitive dynamics of societies of social minds.

Nonetheless, I wish Goertzel and Novamente luck, and look forward to seeing what they can accomplish.

A team of three academics at MIT and the University of Hong Kong is launching an international collaboration to create a set of novel courses to address this need. The first one, Neurotechnology Ventures, is being taught in Spring 2007 and focuses on neurotechnologies that are close to solving major human problems. The class explores the problems that neurotechnologists encounter when envisioning, planning, and building startups to bring neuroengineering innovations to the world.

Emphasizing the global nature of any modern neurotechnology, Neurotechnology Ventures will be videoconferenced between the U.S. and China, which is increasingly becoming a major neurotechnology player (including some very daring and scientifically interesting developments in fields such as human spinal cord regenerative medicine). Information will be posted online as the class evolves dynamically, to the web site HTTP://Neuroven.Media.MIT.edu. The goal is to open up this new field to the world, and see if we can solve the major problems of the brain in an open and efficient way.

Ed

Though my queries may seem a bit ameteuristic, it is very important for me to get clarity on these doubts.
Hope my queries will be answered.
Thanking all of you in advance,
sudhi

I don’t know too much about Zach Lynch, other than that he has a blog and refers to his company as the “neurotechnology market authority”, but there are some interesting tidbits from the TR interview:

TR: Research suggests that antidepressants are effective partly because they stimulate neurogenesis. So companies such as BrainCells, based in San Diego, CA, are screening compounds that promote growth of neural stem cells in the brain. They say these drugs could bring new therapies for depression and, eventually, neurodegenerative diseases.

ZL: It’s an exciting area, and the investment community is certainly interested. But the jury is still out.

TR: We’re also starting to see a new kind of therapy for brain-related illnesses — electrical stimulation. Various types of stimulation devices are now on the market to treat epilepsy, depression, and Parkinson’s disease. What are some of the near- and far-term technologies we’ll see with this kind of device?

ZL: We’re seeing explosive growth in this area because scientists are overcoming many of the hurdles in this area. One example is longer battery life, so devices don’t have to be surgically implanted every five years. Researchers are also developing much smaller devices. Advanced Bionics, for example, has a next-generation stimulator in trials for migraines.

In the neurodevice space, the obesity market is coming on strong. Several companies are working on this, including Medtronics and Leptos Biomedical. In obesity, even a small benefit is a breakthrough, because gastric bypass surgery [one of the most common treatments for morbid obesity] is so invasive.

In the next 10 years, I think we’ll start to see a combination of technologies, like maybe a brain stimulator that releases L-dopa [a treatment for Parkinson's disease]. Whether that’s viable is a whole other question, but that possibility is there because of the microelectronics revolution.

The real breakthrough will come from work on new electrodes. This will transform neurostimulator applications. With these technologies, you can create noninvasive devices and target very specific parts of the brain. It’s like going from a Model T to a Ferrari. Those technologies will present the real competition for drugs.