[Robotgroup] Rats in the news .... and making some neurotrophic electrodes.

[Bryan Bishop]

On Friday 15 August 2008, Eric Lundquist wrote:
> Are you seriously considering attempting to replicate this research
> project?  I don't mean to sound negative.  Heaven knows I've tried
> all sorts of off the wall tasks, but replicating the facilities and
> resources of a funded university research lab doing cutting-edge
> multi-discipline research is probably over reaching a bit.

Yes and no. Neural cultures have been something that I've been looking 
into for quite a while. I don't care if it ends up with me being in a 
lab somewhere because of a nice, thorough grant proposal; anything that 
works really. I agree that lab facilities are going to be nicer than 
what I can arrange on my own. Hey, any donations?

BTW, this isn't cutting edge. We've (as in, everyone else but me has) 
been doing similar things for decades. Growing a tissue culture, wiring 
it up. The hard part is making it do the ratbot thing in a reliable 
manner, of course, but that's not a reasonable first goal -- getting 
signals in and out, and to fire ;-) is a good start.

> IMHO, A more feasible project would be to use one of the many neural
> net packages ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/nnf/?abmode=1 ) or
> even one of the neuron simulators (
> http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/ ) as your "brain tissue" and tie
> that into a small mobile platform such as a BOE Bot.

I have good news for you. :-) I'm already there (mostly).

http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/Computational_neuroscience
http://heybryan.org/shots/2008-07-10_wine_brainbow_fail.png
http://heybryan.org/shots/2008-07-17_brainshot.png

Computational neuroscience and the simulation packages like pNEURON, 
PDP++, GENESIS, and other packages have been known to run on my system 
in various states of functionality from time to time. 

I'm also writing a Google Maps interface to 2D cross sections of the 
brain to correlate 23andme SNP data sets. (Actually it might be 
deCODEme or something + dbSNP from Entrez). Don't know how much value 
I'm going to be able to extract out of it ...
	http://heybryan.org/humancortex.html

Funny you should mention BOE bot. I think that was my first basic stamp 
kit thingy.

- Bryan
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