Thursday, April 2, 2009
Decoding the vocabulary the brain uses to recognize faces
Why are human beings able to recognize people in pictures but unable to do that when a negative of the same photo is put before them? According to Professor Pawan Sinha of the Sinha Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), that's because the brain uses certain codes to recognize faces. His study, done with two other researchers at MIT, has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the second week of March, and has the potential for many medical and non-medical uses in fields such as autism and identification technology.
"The starting point for this work is an observation many of us are familiar with – that when we look at a negative it is hard to recognize who are the people," Sinha told News India-Times. "The question is – why is it so hard – because all of the information is in that negative – I can produce a positive without any additional information. But somehow the brain is unable to make use of that information and its recognition performance is severely compromised."
Sinha's earlier research into light and dark relationships between different parts of the face, showed that in most cases when there was normal light around, a person's eyes appeared darker than the forehead and cheeks.
To read the full article, click here..
To read the ePaper, visit: http://www.newsindia-times.com
"The starting point for this work is an observation many of us are familiar with – that when we look at a negative it is hard to recognize who are the people," Sinha told News India-Times. "The question is – why is it so hard – because all of the information is in that negative – I can produce a positive without any additional information. But somehow the brain is unable to make use of that information and its recognition performance is severely compromised."
Sinha's earlier research into light and dark relationships between different parts of the face, showed that in most cases when there was normal light around, a person's eyes appeared darker than the forehead and cheeks.
To read the full article, click here..
To read the ePaper, visit: http://www.newsindia-times.com
Labels: brain, brain encodes faces, brain uses certain codes to recognize faces, Decoding the vocabulary, human beings, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, photo negatives, Professor Pawan Sinha
Friday, October 3, 2008
Developing wheelchair responding to verbal commands
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers led by Assistant Professor Nicholas Roy, are developing an autonomous wheelchair that can respond to verbal commands and learn the locations in a building.
A wheelchair occupant just has to say "take me to the cafeteria" or "go to my room," and relax in the chair as it maneuvers from one place to another based on a map stored in its memory, the MIT news reported on September 19.
"It's a system that can learn and adapt to the user," said Nicholas Roy, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics and co-developer of the wheelchair. Each chair could be personalized by the user, he said, based on what the per son wants to feed into the computerized chair.
Previous attempts to program wheelchairs and other mobile instruments have used intensive manual detailed mapping the chair being developed by Roy etal can learn about its environment almost like a human by being taken around on a guided tour and talking to it about the various landmarks.
To read the full article, click here..
To read the ePaper, visit: http://www.newsindia-times.com
A wheelchair occupant just has to say "take me to the cafeteria" or "go to my room," and relax in the chair as it maneuvers from one place to another based on a map stored in its memory, the MIT news reported on September 19.
"It's a system that can learn and adapt to the user," said Nicholas Roy, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics and co-developer of the wheelchair. Each chair could be personalized by the user, he said, based on what the per son wants to feed into the computerized chair.
Previous attempts to program wheelchairs and other mobile instruments have used intensive manual detailed mapping the chair being developed by Roy etal can learn about its environment almost like a human by being taken around on a guided tour and talking to it about the various landmarks.
To read the full article, click here..
To read the ePaper, visit: http://www.newsindia-times.com
Labels: Assistant Professor Nicholas Roy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mobile instruments, program, researchers, respond, verbal commands, wheelchair
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