̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Daniel Wolpert

Nine Cambridge researchers among this year’s Royal Society medal and award winners

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 05:00:00 +0000

He is one of the 25 Royal Society medals and awards winners announced today, nine of whom are researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��annual prizes celebrate exceptional researchers and outstanding contributions to science across a wide array of fields.

President of the Royal Society, Venki Ramakrishnan, said:

" ̽��ֱ��Royal Society’s medals and awards celebrate those researchers whose ground-breaking work has helped answer fundamental questions and advance our understanding of the world around us. They also champion those who have reinforced science’s place in society, whether through inspiring public engagement, improving our education system, or by making STEM careers more inclusive and rewarding.

"This year has highlighted how integral science is in our daily lives, and tackling the challenges we face, and it gives me great pleasure to congratulate all our winners and thank them for their work."

Sir Alan Fersht FMedSci FRS, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Chemistry and former Master of Gonville and Caius College, is awarded the Copley Medal for the development and application of methods to describe protein folding pathways at atomic resolution, revolutionising our understanding of these processes.

"Most of us who become scientists do so because science is one of the most rewarding and satisfying of careers and we actually get paid for doing what we enjoy and for our benefitting humankind. Recognition of one’s work, especially at home, is icing on the cake," said Sir Alan. "Like many Copley medallists, I hail from a humble immigrant background and the first of my family to go to university. If people like me are seen to be honoured for science, then I hope it will encourage young people in similar situations to take up science."

As the latest recipient of the Royal Society’s premier award, Sir Alan joins an elite group of scientists, that includes Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Dorothy Hodgkin, and more recently Professor John Goodenough (2020) for his research on the rechargeable lithium battery, Peter Higgs (2015), the physicist who hypothesised the existence of the Higgs Boson, and DNA fingerprinting pioneer Alec Jeffreys (2014).

Professor Barry Everitt FMedSci FRS, from the Department of Psychology and former Master of Downing College, receives the Croonian Medal and Lecture for research which has elucidated brain mechanisms of motivation and applied them to important societal issues such as drug addiction.

Professor Everitt said: "In addition to my personal pride about having received this prestigious award, I hope that it helps draw attention to experimental addiction research, its importance and potential."

Professor Herbert Huppert FRS of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and a Fellow of King’s College, receives a Royal Medal for outstanding achievements in the physical sciences. He has been at the forefront of research in fluid mechanics. As an applied mathematician he has consistently developed highly original analysis of key natural and industrial processes. Further to his research, he has chaired policy work on how science can help defend against terrorism, and carbon capture and storage in Europe.

In addition to the work for which they are recognised with an award, several of this year’s recipients have also been working on issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Julia Gog of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and a Fellow of Queens’ College, receives the Rosalind Franklin Award and Lecture for her achievements in the field of mathematics. Her expertise in infectious diseases and virus modelling has seen her contribute to the pandemic response, including as a participant at SAGE meetings. ̽��ֱ��STEM project component of her award will produce resources for Key Stage 3 (ages 11-14) maths pupils and teachers exploring the curriculum in the context of modelling epidemics and infectious diseases and showing how maths can change the world for the better.

̽��ֱ��Society’s Michael Faraday Prize is awarded to Sir David Spiegelhalter OBE FRS, of the Winton Centre for Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and a Fellow of Churchill College, for bringing key insights from the disciplines of statistics and probability vividly home to the public at large, and to key decision-makers, in entertaining and accessible ways, most recently through the COVID-19 pandemic.

̽��ֱ��full list of Cambridge’s 2020 winners and their award citations:

Copley Medal
Alan Fersht FMedSci FRS, Department of Chemistry, and Gonville and Caius College
He has developed and applied the methods of protein engineering to provide descriptions of protein folding pathways at atomic resolution, revolutionising our understanding of these processes.

Croonian Medal and Lecture
Professor Barry Everitt FMedSci FRS, Department of Psychology and Downing College
He has elucidated brain mechanisms of motivation and applied them to important societal issues such as drug addiction.

Royal Medal A
Professor Herbert Huppert FRS, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and King’s College
He has been at the forefront of research in fluid mechanics. As an applied mathematician he has consistently developed highly original analysis of key natural and industrial processes.

Hughes Medal
Professor Clare Grey FRS, Department of Chemistry and Pembroke College
For her pioneering work on the development and application of new characterization methodology to develop fundamental insight into how batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells operate.

Ferrier Medal and Lecture
Professor Daniel Wolpert FMedSci FRS, Department of Engineering and Trinity College
For ground-breaking contributions to our understanding of how the brain controls movement. Using theoretical and experimental approaches he has elucidated the computational principles underlying skilled motor behaviour.

Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture
Sir David Spiegelhalter OBE FRS, Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and Churchill College
For bringing key insights from the disciplines of statistics and probability vividly home to the public at large, and to key decision-makers, in entertaining and accessible ways, most recently through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Milner Award and Lecture
Professor Zoubin Ghahramani FRS, Department of Engineering and St John’s College
For his fundamental contributions to probabilistic machine learning.

Rosalind Franklin Award and Lecture
Professor Julia Gog, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and Queens’ College
For her achievements in the field of mathematics and her impactful project proposal with its potential for a long-term legacy.

Royal Society Mullard Award
Professor Stephen Jackson FMedSci FRS, Gurdon Institute, Department of Biochemistry
For pioneering research on DNA repair mechanisms and synthetic lethality that led to the discovery of olaparib, which has reached blockbuster status for the treatment of ovarian and breast cancers.

̽��ֱ��full list of medals and awards, including their description and past winners can be found on the Royal Society website: https://royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/awards/

Adapted from a Royal Society press release.

A leading pioneer in the field of protein engineering, Sir Alan Fersht FMedSci FRS, has been named as the 2020 winner of the world’s oldest scientific prize, the Royal Society’s prestigious Copley Medal.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

We ask the experts: will robots take over the world?

fpjl2 — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 11:03:08 +0000

̽��ֱ��origins of robotics go back to the automata invented by ancient civilisations. ̽��ֱ��word robot entered our vocabulary only in 1920 with Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Over the past 20 years robots have been developed to work in settings that range from manufacturing industry to space. At Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, robotics is a rapidly developing field within many departments, from theoretical physics and computing to engineering and medical science.

Lord Martin Rees is Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. He holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal. Lord Rees is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of the Existential Risk, an early stage initiative which brings together a scientist, philosopher and software entrepreneur. Kathleen Richardson is an anthropologist of robots. She took her PhD at Cambridge and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UCL. She is writing a book that explores the representational models used by scientists and how they influence ideas we have about robots as potential friends or enemies. Daniel Wolpert is a Royal Research Society Professor in the Department of Engineering, Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. His expertise lies in bioengineering and especially the mechanisms that control interactions between brain and body. ̽��ֱ��focus of his research group is an understanding of movement, which he believes is central to all human activities.

What can robots do for us?
Martin Rees I think robots have two very different roles. ̽��ֱ��first is to operate in locations that humans can’t reach, such as the aftermaths of accidents in mines, oil-rigs and nuclear power stations. ̽��ֱ��second, also deeply unglamorous, is to help elderly or disabled people with everyday life: tying shoelaces, cutting toenails and suchlike. Moreover, if robots can be miniaturised, they can perhaps be used inside our bodies for monitoring our health, undertaking surgery, and so forth.

Kathleen Richardson Some of the roles that robots are expected to play are because we cannot do them as humans - for example, to explore outer space. Space exploration is an area where robots are helpful. Robots can be remote and act as extended ‘eyes’ for humans, enabling us to look beyond our visual experience into terrains that are inhospitable to us. Other roles that robots are expected to perform are roles that humans can play, such as helping the elderly or the infirm. Unfortunately these roles are not best suited to machines, but to other people. So the question is: why would we prefer a machine do them for us?

Daniel Wolpert While computers can now beat grandmasters at chess, there is currently no robot that can match the dexterity of a five-year-old child. ̽��ֱ��field of robotics is similar to where computers were in the 1960s - expensive machines used in simple, repetitive industrial processes. But modern day robotics is changing that. Robots are likely to become as ubiquitous as the smartphone computers we all carry - from microscopic robotics for healthcare and fabrication to human-size robots to take on our everyday tasks or even act as companions.

How soon will machine intelligence outstrip human intelligence?
MR Up till now, the advances have been patchy. For at least the last 30 years, we’ve been able to buy for a few pounds a machine that can do arithmetic faster than our brains can. Back in the 1990s IBM's 'Deep Blue' beat Kasparov, the world chess champion. And more recently a computer called ‘Watson’ beat human challengers in a verbal quiz game on television. But robots are still limited in their ability to sense their environment: they can't yet recognise and move the pieces on a real chessboard as cleverly as a child can. Later this century, however, their more advanced successors may relate to their surroundings (and to people) as adeptly as we do. Moral questions then arise. We accept an obligation to ensure that other human beings, and indeed some animal species, can fulfil their 'natural’ potential. So what's our obligation towards sophisticated robots? Should we feel guilty about exploiting them? Should we fret if they are underemployed, frustrated, or bored?

KR As an anthropologist, I question the idea of ‘objective’ human intelligence. There are just cultural measures about what intelligence is and therefore machines could outstrip ‘human intelligence’. When that happens will depend on what we decide is the measure of intelligence. Each generation makes a new definition of what it means to be human and what is uniquely a human quality, then a machine comes along and meets it and so many people despair that humanity is on the brink of its own annihilation. This fear of machines is not something inherent in them, it is a consequences of the modes of mimesis (copying and representation) used in the making of robots. This could be seen as a modern form of animism. Animism is a term to describe the personification of nature, but I believe we can apply it to machines. Human beings personify just about everything: we see faces in clouds, mystical impressions in Marmite and robots as an autonomous threat. ̽��ֱ��human fear of robots and machines arguably has much more to say about human fear of each other rather than anything inherently technical in the machines. However, one of the consequences of thinking that the problem lies with machines is that as a culture we tend to imagine they are greater and more powerful than they really are and subsequently they become so.

DW In a limited sense it already has. Machines can already navigate, remember and search for items with an ability that far outstrips humans. However, there is no machine that can identify visual objects or speech with the reliability and flexibility of humans. These abilities are precursors to any real intelligence such as the ability to reason creatively and invent new problems. Expecting a machine close to the creative intelligence of a human within the next 50 years would be highly ambitious.

Should we be scared by advances in artificial intelligence?
MR Those who should be worried are the futurologists who believe in the so-called ‘singularity’, when robots take over and themselves create even more sophisticated progeny. And another worry is that we are increasingly dependent on computer networks, and that these could behave like a single ‘brain’ with a mind of its own, and with goals that may be contrary to human welfare. I think we should ensure that robots remain as no more than ‘idiot savants’ – lacking the capacity to outwit us, even though they may greatly surpass us in the ability to calculate and process information.

KR We need to ask why fears of artificial intelligence and robots persist; none have in fact risen up and challenged human supremacy. To understand what underscores these fears, we need to understand science and technology as having a particular and exclusionary kind of mimesis. Mimesis is the way we copy and imitate. In creating artificial intelligence machines and robots we are copying the human. Part of what we copy is related to the psychic world of the maker, and then the maker is copying ideas, techniques and practices into the machine that are given by the cultural spirit (the science, technology, and life) of the moment. All these factors are fused together in the making of artificial intelligence and robots. So we have to ask why it is also so frightening to make this copy? Not all fear a robotic uprising; many people welcome machine intelligence and see it as wonderful opportunity to create a new life. So to understand why some fear and some embrace you really have to know what models of mimesis go into the making of robots.

DW We have already seen the damaging effects of simplest forms of artificial self-replicating intelligence in the form of computer viruses. But in this case, the real intelligence is the malicious designer. Critically, the benefits of computers outweigh the damage that computer viruses cause. Similarly, while there may be misuses of robotics in the near future, the benefits that they will bring are likely to outweigh these negative aspects. I think it is reasonable to be concerned that we may reach a time when robotic intelligence outstrips humans’ and robots are able to design and produce robots more advanced than themselves.

Should robots be used to colonise other planets?
MR By the end of the century, the entire solar system -- planets, moons and asteroids -- will be explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft. ̽��ֱ��next step would be mining of asteroids, enabling fabrication of large structures in space without having to bring all the raw materials from Earth. It would be possible to develop huge artefacts: giant telescopes with gossamer-thin mirrors assembled under zero gravity, collectors of solar energy, and so forth. I think this is more realistic and benign than the so-called ‘terraforming’ of planets – which should be preserved with a status that is analogous to Antarctica here on Earth (at least until we are sure that there is no form of life already there).

KR I am not happy with the word ‘colonise’ for humans or robots. Europeans colonised other peoples’ lands and left a long legacy of enslavement, problems, disease and, for many, suffering. I think whether we do something on Earth or on Mars we should always do it in the spirit of a genuine interest in ‘the-Other’, not to impose a particular model, but to meet ‘the-Other’. Robots could help us to go to places we can not physically go ourselves, but these robots can not interpret what they are seeing for us.

DW I don’t see a pressing need to colonise other planets unless we can bring resources back to Earth. ̽��ֱ��vast majority of Earth is currently inaccessible to us. Using robots to gather resources nearer to home would seem to be a better use of our robotic tools.

What can science fiction tell us about robotics?
MR I sometimes advise students that it’s better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science -- more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong. Even those of us who don’t buy the idea of a singularity by mid-century would expect sustained, if not enhanced, rate of innovation in biotech, nanotech and in information science. I think there will be robotic entities with superhuman intellect within a few centuries. Post-human intelligence (whether in organic form, or in autonomously-evolving artefacts) will develop hyper-computers with the processing power to simulate living things, even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could use hyper-computers to surpass the best 'special effects' in movies or computer games so vastly that they could simulate a world fully as complex as the one we perceive ourselves to be in. Maybe these kinds of super-intelligences already exist elsewhere in the universe.

KR Fiction and science fiction is so important for everyday life. In Western culture we tend to think there is reality on the one hand, and fiction and fantasy on the other. This separation does not exist in all cultures, but science and technologists made this deliberate separation because they wanted to carve out the sphere of their work. In doing this they denigrated lots of valuable knowledge, such as myth and metaphor, that might be important in developing a richer model. But the divide is not so clear cut and that is why the worlds seem to collide at times. In some cases we need to bring these different understandings together to get a whole perspective. Perhaps then, we won’t be so frightened that something we create as a copy of ourselves will be so threatening to us.

DW Science fiction has often been remarkable at predicting the future from Arthur C Clarke’s idea of satellite communication to Star Trek’s communicators which now look old fashioned compared to modern mobile phones. Science fiction has painted a vivid spectrum of possible futures, from cute and helpful robots (Star Wars) to dystopian (I Robot) robotic societies. Interestingly, almost no science fiction envisages a future without robots.

Robots can do a lot for us: they can explore space or they can cut our toenails. But do advances in robotics and artificial intelligence hold hidden threats? Three leaders in their fields answer questions about our relationships with robots.

By the end of the century, the entire solar system -- planets, moons and asteroids -- will be explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft

Martin Rees

Robot head

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Yes

Royal Society announces new Fellows

ns480 — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:01:49 +0000

Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society said: “Science impacts on most aspects of modern life, improving our understanding of the world and playing an increasing role as we grapple with problems such as feeding a growing global population and keeping an ageing home population healthy. These scientists who have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society are among the world’s finest. They follow in the footsteps of luminaries such as Newton, Darwin and Einstein and I am delighted to welcome them into our ranks.”

̽��ֱ��new Fellows are:

Professor Shankar Balasubramanian, Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Senior Group Leader, Cancer Research UK, Cambridge Research Institute and Fellow of Trinity College is distinguished for pioneering contributions to chemistry and its application to the biological and medical sciences. He is a principal inventor of the leading next generation sequencing methodology, Solexa sequencing, that has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality and has revolutionised biology.

Professor David Klenerman, Professor in Biophysical Chemistry and Director of Studies at Christ's College has developed and applied new general biophysical methods based on fluorescence and scanning probe microscopy to study important biomolecular complexes such as human telomerase, key biological processes such as protein folding/misfolding, and to image functionally the surface of the living cell at the level of individual protein complexes.

Professor Tony Kouzarides, Royal Society Napier Professor at the Gurdon Institute, is a world leader in the field of chromatin modification and its roles in transcriptional control and cancer. His finding in 1996 that the transcriptional co-activator CBP is a histone acetyltransferase was one of the key discoveries that started the modern era of chromatin research.

Professor Margaret Scott Robinson, Professor of Molecular Cell Biology, at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, is the foremost expert on the adaptins, proteins which recruit transmembrane receptors to budding vesicles and play a key role in endocytosis and protein sorting. She identified and characterised the clathrin-associated adaptors AP-1 and AP-2, and provided crucial insights into how they recognise different membranes.

Professor Mark Warner, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory and Fellow of Corpus Christi is one of the founders of the field of Liquid Crystal Elastomers and has thereby predicted new phenomena hitherto unknown to classical elasticity, liquid crystals and rubber, for instance large thermo and opto-mechanical effects, liquid-like shape changes, mechano-chiral response and soft ferro-electric solids.

Professor Daniel Wolpert, Fellow of Trinity College is a world leader in the computational study of sensorimotor control and learning, transforming our understanding of how the brain controls movement. Combining theoretical and behavioural work, he has placed the field of sensorimotor control firmly within the probabilistic domain and shown how neural noise plays a pivotal role in determining both how we process information during action and how we generate actions.

Also honoured were:

Professor Gordon Dougan, Honorary Professor in the Vet School and Fellow of Wolfson College.

Hermann Hauser, Honorary Fellow of Hughes Hall and Honorary Fellow King's College

Six Cambridge researchers are among the 44 new Fellows announced by the Royal Society this week.

These scientists who have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society are among the world’s finest. They follow in the footsteps of luminaries such as Newton, Darwin and Einstein and I am delighted to welcome them into our ranks.

Sir Paul Nurse

̽��ֱ��Royal Society

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Yes

̽��ֱ��man with the golden brain

bjb42 — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:32:24 +0000

̽��ֱ��sea squirt, a type of marine filter feeder, swims around looking for somewhere to settle down for the rest of its life. Once parked on a rock in a suitable spot, it never moves again. So the first thing it does is eat its own brain. While this may seem a little rash to some, for Professor Daniel Wolpert it makes perfect evolutionary sense.

“To me it’s obvious that there’s no point in the brain processing or storing anything if it can’t have benefits for physical movement, because that’s the only way we improve our survival,” says Wolpert. “I believe that to understand movement is to understand the whole brain. Memory, cognition, sensory processing – they are there for a reason, and that reason is action.”

Wolpert is firmly convinced that movement is the underlying factor and final result behind every functional aspect of a brain. “There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood, or perceiving the colour of a rose, if it doesn’t affect the way you’re going to move in later life,” he says.

A professor in the Department of Engineering, Wolpert examines computational models and uses simple behavioural experiments to describe and predict how the brain solves problems related to action. Through this combination of theoretical and behavioural work, Wolpert has begun to revolutionise the study of human sensorimotor control, the way in which the brain controls physical movement.

He was recently presented with the prestigious Golden Brain Award by the California-based Minerva Foundation. ̽��ֱ��award is given to those producing original and outstanding research into the nature of the brain, regarded by many as the most complex object in the known universe.

So what occurs in the brain when humans produce movement? Science has long struggled with the mysteries of this question. Wolpert uses the example of the game of chess: “We have computers that can generate algorithms of possible chess moves at tremendous speeds, beating the best human chess players. But ask a machine to compete on a dextrous level, such as moving a chess piece from one square to another, and the most advanced robot will fail every time against the average five-year-old child.”

̽��ֱ��models employed by Wolpert and his team have yielded startling results, offering a possible glimpse into the patterns integral to our mental matrix. “It turns out that the brain behaves in a very statistical manner, representing information about the world as probabilities and processes, which is possible to predict mathematically,” says Wolpert. “We’ve shown that this is a very powerful framework for understanding the brain.”

For action to occur, a command is sent from the brain causing muscles to contract and the body to move. Sensory feedback is then received from vision, skin, muscles and so on, to help gauge success. Sounds simple, but a vast amount of misinformation or ‘noise’ is generated with even the most basic action, due to the imperfections in our senses and the almost incalculable variables of the physical world around us. “We work in a whole sensory/task soup of noise,” says Wolpert. “ ̽��ֱ��brain goes to a lot of effort to reduce the negative consequences of this noise and variability.”

̽��ֱ��brain’s crystal ball

To combat this noise, our brains have developed a sophisticated predictive ability, so that every action is based on an orchestrated balance between current sensory data and, crucially, past experience. Memory is a key factor in allowing the brain to make the optimal ‘best guess’ for cutting through the noise, producing the most advantageous movement for the task. In this way, our brains are constantly attempting to predict the future.

“An intuitive example of this predictive ability might be returning a serve in tennis. You need to decide where the ball is going to bounce to produce the most effective return. ̽��ֱ��brain uses the sensory evidence, such as vision and sound, and combines it with experience, prior knowledge of where the ball has bounced in the past. This creates an area of ‘belief’, the brains best guess of where ball will hit court, and the command for action is generated accordingly.”

Movement can take a long time from command to muscles, which can leave us exposed. Like chess, we need to be anticipating several moves ahead, so the brain uses its predictive ability to try and internally replicate the response to an action as or even before it is made, a kind of inbuilt simulator. ̽��ֱ��brain then subtracts this simulation from our actual experience, so it isn’t adding to the noise of misinformation.

“For behavioural causality, we need to be more attuned to the outside world as opposed to inside our own bodies. When our neural simulator makes a prediction, it is only based on internal movement commands. ̽��ֱ��brain subtracts that prediction from the overall sensation, so that everything left over is hopefully external.”

But this can have intriguing effects on our perceptions of the physical world, and the consequences of our actions. “This is why we can’t tickle ourselves, as tickling relies on an inability to predict sensation, and your neural simulator has already subtracted the sensation from the signal,” says Wolpert.

“But they hit me harder!”

A further example of this sensory subtraction occurred to Wolpert during a

backseat bust-up between his daughters, a familiar experience for most parents during long car journeys. ̽��ֱ��traditional escalation of hostility was ensuing as each child claimed they got hit harder and so retaliated in kind.

Wolpert explains: “You underestimate a force when you generate it, so as one child hits another, they predict the sensory movement consequences and subtract it off, thinking they’ve hit the other less hard than they have. Whereas the recipient doesn’t make the prediction so feels the full blow. So if they retaliate with the same force, it will appear to the first child to have been escalated.”

This observation led to a simple but effective experiment being conducted called ‘tit for tat’, in which two adults sit opposite each other with their fingers on either side of a force transducer. They were asked to replicate the force demonstrated by each other when pushing against the other's finger. Instead of remaining constant, a 70 percent escalation of force is recorded on each go. It seems that we really don’t know our own strength.

Deciding to act

̽��ֱ��next challenge for Wolpert is to investigate how we make the decision to act, and what happens in the brain if we change our minds after the initial decision. “We think that the fields of both decision making and action share a lot of common features, and our goal is to try and link them together to create a unifying model of how actions affect decisions and vice versa,” says Wolpert.

“As we walk around the world, do our decisions depend on how much effort is required, and to what extend does perceived effort influence the decisions we make? Similarly, to what extent does perceived effort relate to the decision to change our minds? These are the questions we want to address.”

To this end, Wolpert is about to begin on a project for the Human Frontiers Science Programme on linking decision to action. “We’ve developed robotic interfaces in the lab which allow us to control and create experiences that people won’t have had before,” he says.

“We ask subjects to perform simple tasks using a joystick. Once they are in a rhythm, we generate forces that act proportionally to speed but perturb their arm in unusual ways, such as right angles, and see how they respond. This allows us to build a dataset on novel learning, how people adapt to various forces, and the decisions that they make in the process.”

Wolpert’s ultimate aim is to apply these models of the brain and how it controls movement to a greater understanding of brain disorders. As he explains: “Five percent of the population suffers from diseases that affect movement. ̽��ֱ��hope is that we will not only understand what goes wrong in disease, but how to design better mechanisms for rehabilitation.”

What’s the point of a brain? This fundamental question has led Professor Daniel Wolpert to some remarkable conclusions about how and why the brain controls and predicts movement. In a recent talk for TED, Wolpert explores the research that resulted in him receiving the Golden Brain Award.

I believe that to understand movement is to understand the whole brain.

Professor Daniel Wolpert

Daniel Wolpert: ̽��ֱ��real reason for brains

thelunch_box via Flickr

Neurons, in vitrio colour!

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Yes

A move towards understanding

bjb42 — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:12:57 +0000

Movement is the only way we have of interacting with the world, whether foraging for food or attracting a waiter’s attention. All communication, including speech, sign language, gestures and writing, is mediated via the motor system. Taking this viewpoint, the purpose of the human brain is to use sensory signals to determine future actions.

However, the effortless ease with which we move our arms, our eyes, even our lips when we speak, masks the true complexity of the control processes involved. This is evident when we try to build machines to perform human control tasks. While computers can now beat grandmasters at chess, no computer can yet control a robot to manipulate a chess piece with the dexterity of a six-year-old child. Therefore understanding brain processing could lead to dramatic improvements in technology.

A major area of Wolpert’s research programme is to understand how the brain deals with uncertainty inherent in the world and in our own sensory and motor systems. For example, our only access to knowledge about the world is through our senses which provide information that is usually corrupted by random fluctuations, termed noise, which lead to variability in our perception – try localising your hand when it is hidden under a table. In addition sensory inputs may provide ambiguous information about the possible states of the environment – you can’t tell if a teapot is full or empty just by looking at it. Moreover, when we act on the world through our motor system, the commands we send to our muscles are also corrupted by variability or noise that leads to inaccuracy in our movements.

This combined sensory and motor variability limits the precision with which we can perceive and act on the world. Society places a premium on those of us who can reduce the overall variability of our sensory processing and motor outputs – financial rewards accrue to those who can reliably hit a small white ball into a hole several hundred yards away using a long metal stick.

Wolpert’s group has shown that not only does society care about reducing variability, but also that the brain dedicates its resources to reducing the uncertainty and variability in sensory and motor processing.

To investigate how the brain reduces uncertainty the group has developed state-of-the-art robotic interfaces and virtual reality systems that allow researchers to control the environment as well as the visual feedback that volunteers experience during skill learning tasks. Using this apparatus, the group has recently shown that when we learn a new task, although we are not aware of it, our brains combine our prior experience with our current sensory input in an optimal fashion.

̽��ֱ��precise way in which these two sources of information are combined is given by a formula known as Bayes rule, named after Thomas Bayes, an 18th century English Presbyterian minister. ̽��ֱ��fundamental idea of Bayes rule is that probabilities can be used to represent the degree of belief in different propositions about ourselves and the world – such as the probability that one is looking at an apple or tennis ball or that one’s hand is at different possible locations when hidden under a table-top. Bayes rule specifies the optimal way that these probabilities should be updated as new information is received. Bayesian methods are currently a major component of statistics and Wolpert’s group is investigating to what extent they may provide a unifying mechanism by which the brain makes estimates about our own body and the world and chooses optimal actions.

https://learning.eng.cam.ac.uk/Public/Wolpert/

Professor Daniel Wolpert at Cambridge’s Department of Engineering has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Programme Grant to study the computations the brain performs when controlling our movements.

While computers can now beat grandmasters at chess, no computer can yet control a robot to manipulate a chess piece with the dexterity of a six-year-old child.

Identity Photgr@phy on Flickr

̽��ֱ��swing

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Yes