Seminar Topics - Brain Computer Interface

Brain-Computer interface is a staple of science fiction writing.  Init's earliest  incarnations nomechanism was thought necessary, as the  technology seemed so far fetched that no explanation was likely.   As more became known about the brain however, the possibility has become more real and the science fiction more technically sophisticated.  Recently, the cyberpunk movement has adopted the idea of 'jacking in', sliding 'biosoft' chips into slots implanted in the skull (Gibson, W. 1984).  

                              Although such  biosofts are still science fiction, there have been several recent steps toward interfacing the brain and computers.  Chief among these are techniques for stimulating and recording from areas of the brain with   permanently implanted electrodes and using conscious control of EEG to control computers. 

                                         

                                        Some preliminary work is being done on synapsing neurons on silicon transformers and on growing neurons into neural networks on top of computer chips.The most advanced work in designing a brain-computer interface has stemmed   from the evolution of traditional electrodes.  There are essentially two main problems, stimulating the brain (input) and recording from the brain (output).

                             

                                        Traditionally, both input and output were handled by electrodes pulled from metal wires and glass tubing.Using conventional electrodes, multi-unit recordings can be constructed from mutlibarrelled pipettes.   In addition to being fragile and bulky, the electrodes in these arrays are often too far apart, as most fine neural processes are only .1 to 2 µm apart.

                                   

 

                      Pickard describes a new type   of electrode, which circumvents many of the problems listed above.  These printed circuit micro-electrodes (PCMs) are manufactured in the same manner of computer chips.  A design of a chip is photoreduced to produce an image on a photosensitive glass plate. This is used as a mask, which covers a UV sensitive glass or plastic film.

   A PCM has three essential elements:

                           1) the tissue terminals,

                           2) a circuit board controlling or reading from the terminals      

                           3) a Input/Output controller-interpreter,  such as a computer.                                     

Engineering Seminar Topics

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mobile agent

In computer science, a mobile agent is a composition of computer software and data which is able to migrate (move) from one computer to another autonomously and continue its execution on the destination computer.
Mobile Agent, namely, is a type of software agent, with the feature of autonomy, social ability, learning, and most important, mobility.
When the term mobile agent is used, it refers to a process that can transport its state from one environment to another, with its data intact, and still being able to perform appropriately in the new environment. Mobile agents decide when and where to move next, which is evolved from RPC. So how exactly does a mobile agent move? Just like a user doesn t really visit a website but only make a copy of it, a mobile agent accomplishes this move through data duplication. When a mobile agent decides to move, it saves its own state and transports this saved state to next host and resume execution from the saved state.
Mobile agents are a specific form of mobile code and software agents paradigms. However, in contrast to the Remote evaluation and Code on demand paradigms, mobile agents are active in that they may choose to migrate between computers at any time during their execution. This makes them a powerful tool for implementing distributed applications in a computer network.

Advantages
1) Move computation to data, reducing network load.
2) Asynchronous execution on multiple heterogeneous network hosts
3) Dynamic adaptation - actions are dependent on the state of the host environment
4) Tolerant to network faults - able to operate without an active connection between client and server
5) Flexible maintenance - to change an agent s actions, only the source (rather than the computation hosts) must be updated

Applications
1) Resource availability, discovery, monitoring
2) Information retrieval
3) Network management
4) Dynamic software deployment

Robocode

Robocode is an Open Source educational game by Mathew Nelson (originally R was provided by IBM). It is designed to help people learn to program in Java and enjoy the experience. It is very easy to start - a simple robot can be written in just a few minutes - but perfecting a bot can take months or more. Competitors write software that controls a miniature tank that fights other identically-built (but differently programmed) tanks in a playing field. Robots move, shoot at each other, scan for each other, and hit the walls (or other robots) if they aren t careful. Though the idea of this game may seem simple, the actual strategy needed to win is not.Good robots have hundreds of lines in their code dedicated to strategy. Some of the more successful robots use techniques such as statistical analysis and attempts at neural networks in their designs. One can test a robot against many other competitors by downloading their bytecode, so design competition is fierce. Robocode provides a security sandbox (bots are restricted in what they can do on the machine they run on) which makes this a safe thing to do.Topic Taken From Seminar Topics

Hydrophone

A hydrophone is a sound-to-electricity transducer for use in water or other liquids, analogous to a microphone for air. Note that a hydrophone can sometimes also serve as a projector (emitter), but not all hydrophones have this capability, and may be destroyed if used in such a manner.The first device to be called a 'hydrophone' was developed when the technology matured, and used ultrasonic waves, which would provide for higher overall acoustic output, as well as increasing detection. The ultrasonic waves were produced by a mosaic of thin quartz crystals glued between two steel plates, having a resonant frequency of about 150 kHz. Contemporary hydrophones more often use barium titanate, a piezoelectric ceramic material, giving higher sensitivity than quartz. Hydrophones are an important part of the SONAR system used to detect submarines by both surface vessels and other submarines. A large number of hydrophones were used in the building of various fixed location detection networks such as SOSUS.

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