Monthly Archives: October 2017

Machines moved by mind

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3Q: José Millán

A 'mental worker' (behind screen at right) with Machine 1 at the exhibition Mental Work.

A visitor (behind screen at right) driving Machine 1 using the force of their own thoughts, at the exhibition Mental Work.{credit}© Photography Adrien Baraka / Mental Work{/credit}

At Mental Work, an exhibition at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne ArtLab (EPFL), visitors can drive simple machines using the force of their own thoughts. Probing the rapidly changing relationship between humans and technology, these artworks will also generate vast amounts of data that will be shared with researchers around the world. The show is a collaboration between experimental philosopher Jonathan Keats and EPFL neuroengineer José Millán, who develops brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) to help people with paralysis. Here, Millán talks pistons, probability and the debate over who or what is in control.

What will visitors experience at the show?

Some will be active participants in three experiments; others will watch them work. The participants, or ‘mental workers’, wear an EEG helmet studded with 19 dry electrodes — which continuously pick up electrical activity in their brains. In the first experiment they sit in front of a 2-metre-long construction (Machine 1) comprising a piston, fly-wheel and horizontal shaft. Using mental imagery, they try to move the piston onto the fly wheel; this starts the wheel turning, driving the shaft through a bolt. The brain-machine interface or BMI that makes this possible is an algorithm that has to be trained to ‘read’ the mind of each driver. The driver instigates the training by making a binary movement of the hand or foot, such as clenching and opening a fist, while simultaneously imagining the piston moving or stopping. The algorithm learns the stop-go instructions from patterns of the data from the electrodes, and converts them into commands for the piston. Because the data are always noisy and variable, the command is based on probability; but we program the piston motor to generate movement only when the probability is high — usually in the 70-90% range.

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Another view of a ‘mental worker’ with Machine 1.{credit}© Photography Adrien Baraka / Mental Work{/credit}

What happens in the other two experiments?

They are more complex, and so are the machines. Participants take the role of either ‘driver’ or ‘supervisor’. Supervisors may change the level of probability through their own mental imagery, so the driver has a harder or easier (but messier) job of getting the machine to work. Or the supervisors may use their mental imagery to instruct the BMI to stop using mental imagery altogether, and switch to a different algorithm that use patterns of alpha waves — the brain-wide oscillations generated when the brain is at rest — to drive movement. In this case, the supervisor also uses mental imagery to instruct the driver to relax and ‘empty’ his or her brain. This is the part I am terrified about! We can get this to work in the lab, but it gets so complicated we don’t know what will happen when it is tested in more open conditions. We’ll also distribute a questionnaire asking participants whether they felt they were controlling the machines or if the machines were controlling them.

 

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Machine 2, where ‘drivers’ have their threshold adjusted using a brain-machine interface or BMI.{credit}© Photography Adrien Baraka / Mental Work{/credit}

What do you want to emerge from the exhibition?

We are entering a cognitive revolution in which we will increasingly use many different new technologies to tap into or extend the capabilities of our brains. I hope that Mental Work will help generate a societal debate about this. Could brain power be used to carry out real work in the real world? What would that mean for employment? Will machines take control of our minds, or will our minds always have the control of machines? Personally, I am optimistic – I think the future is up to us. But the debate needs to start now. I hope visitors to this show will also enjoy the aesthetics of these artistic machines. Meanwhile, the data will be very valuable scientifically. We will capture and share it with the BMI research community, which is constantly trying to improve interfaces, for example by increasing the probability that brain signals are correctly read. Our experience suggests that many participants improve their performance as they move from one machine to another, and I expect that the research community will also be able to develop better machine-learning techniques for BMI users. At the end of the day what I really want is help BMI users, particularly  people with paralysis, to generate brain signals that are more stable and easier to decode.

Interview by Alison Abbott, senior European correspondent for Nature. She tweets at @alison_c_abbott

 This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mental Work runs from 27 October – 31 January 2018. The first two weeks are open for registered participants only, so any visitors wishing to participate as ‘mental workers’ must first sign up on the website mentalwork.net. The show opens to the general public on 13 November. It will subsequently move on to swissnex San Francisco in California. 

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

The impossibility of being known

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Posted on behalf of Elizabeth Gibney

Scene from Heisenberg: the Uncertainty Principle

A model relationship: Anne-Marie Duff and Kenneth Cranham

Like Copenhagen, Michael Frayn’s 1990s blockbuster, Heisenberg: the Uncertainty Principle is a play that takes as its muse a notion at the heart of quantum physics: that it is impossible to know both the exact position and momentum of a particle at once.  Where Frayn imagined physicists’ rarefied debates, playwright Simon Stephens uses the idea to probe the messy world of relationships.

The one-act work revolves around 42-year-old Georgie (Anne-Marie Duff), a fabulist, and Alex (Kenneth Cranham), a 75-year-old butcher, who meet in a station. The pair forges an unlikely affair that sees them baring their souls over a period of six weeks.

Stephens exploits the uncertainty principle to explore what he sees as a quirk of human interaction. To predict someone’s movements is to not pay attention to them properly, and knowing someone really well makes it more likely that they will surprise you, he said in interviews ahead of the opening. When Stephens learned of the principle though his son’s love of science, it struck him, he says, “that all life is contained within it”.

Georgie name checks Werner Heisenberg as she lays out the principle to Alex to help explain why she is estranged from her son (the only time the theory, or indeed science, is actually mentioned). The urge to find him drives the story forward. There are further parallels: one interpretation of the principle, for example, is that uncertainty in a particle’s momentum comes from the physical process of measuring its position. Similarly, only by learning about each other do Georgie and Alex change the course of their lives. What in other hands could be somewhat contrived is made enjoyable by stellar performances, thoughtful direction by Marianne Elliot and clever staging and music.

Both characters prove surprising in different ways. Georgie is blunt and quixotic. Duff plays the effervescent role masterfully. Alex’s change of tack is much more subtle. He is at first a grumpy man of a certain age – inured to life and happy to be alone. Cranham movingly shows how breaking through the façade can reveal a complex and raw person, with an boyish zest for life.

Though the script is witty and at times insightful, it doesn’t always ring true. For me, the age gap was perpetually jarring. But it’s almost as if the combination is not supposed to be real. Indeed the play has the feel of a textbook problem: a stripped-back model that asks the audience to imagine an unlikely paring of two people, like particles in a box. The feeling is enhanced by the stark set. Designer Bunny Christie has events take place in a minimalist white space that morphs before our eyes as scenes change.

The uncertainty principle is one of only a few ideas in quantum mechanics that is both intuitive and easy to describe, and the play’s reference to it is thankfully not overcooked. The analogies Stephens draws between life and physics aren’t perfect, but as device for exploring interaction – and a way to remind theatre-goers that science can resonate with human experience and creativity – it works.

Elizabeth Gibney is a senior reporter for Nature based in London. She tweets at @lizziegibney.

Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle is on at the Wyndham’s Theatre, London, until 6 January 2018.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Blade Runner 2049: a dystopian masterwork

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Ryan Gosling as K and Ana d x as Joi in Blade Runner 2049.

Ryan Gosling as K and Ana de Armas as Joi in Blade Runner 2049.{credit}Sony Pictures{/credit}

If director Denis Villeneuve was daunted by creating a sequel to the 1982 cult noir Blade Runner, it doesn’t show. The themes running through his Blade Runner 2049 feel more poignant than ever, the Los Angeles rain falls even harder, and it packs as much of a cinematic punch.

Villeneuve – fresh from his sci-fi success with Arrival in 2016 – has reimagined a world first brought to life by Ridley Scott. Thirty years on, the LA of Blade Runner 2049 is still grimy, bleak and sodden. Neon lights continue to flash and splutter, but now building-high advertisement holograms also shimmer alluringly. Replicants, as the bioengineered humanoids are known, remain enslaved.

The story centres on Officer K (Ryan Gosling), a blade runner — a cop tasked with ‘retiring’ replicants. In the original, loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a jaded predecessor of K, whose mission is to hunt down replicants escaped from off-world colonies. His interaction with them eventually prompts questions about the very premise of his job and his very identity. In 2049, replicants are now the bread and butter of the Earth-bound workforce, a new breed engineered by a new corporation. Under orders from his superior Lieutenant Joshi (a condescending but not entirely unsympathetic character, played by the excellent Robin Wright), K must find and terminate the older rogue models still hiding out.

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K and Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) at the headquarters of the film’s hyper-ambitious bioengineering corporation.{credit}Sony Pictures{/credit}

Where Deckard was burnt-out and moody, K is a stoic and obedient, if lonely, worker – until an investigation brings about a discovery that leads him off course. Gosling does understated very well, shimmering with emotion that only begrudgingly breaks the surface. Ana de Armas is heart-breaking as his unconventional live-in companion; and Sylvia Hoeks makes for a terrifying foe. The dystopian world in which the film is based is rich with remarkable attention to detail. Fans will be thrilled to see Ford pop up for the finale as a grizzled, ageing Deckard.

The original Blade Runner brought to life Dick’s Voight-Kampf test, a form of Turing test designed to catch out androids by probing their biological response to questions that should trigger empathy, an idea that went on to inspire the wider sci-fi genre. In the wake of recent sci-fi successes such as Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), Alex Garland’s Ex-Machina (2014; reviewed here), HBO’s Westworld and the British series Humans, today’s viewers could be forgiven for becoming inured to shows that ask where artificial intelligence ends and humans begin. But Blade Runner 2049 manages to tread fresh ground. K’s modus operandi is a simple iris scan of replicants, but the film finds new ways to probe the question, through themes of morality and identity, and the roles of memory and soul.

Environmental dystopia figures large in the film.

Environmental dystopia figures large in the film.{credit}Sony Pictures{/credit}

Blade Runner 2049 also burns with an environmental message far more glaring than in the 1982 film. The sequel takes the audience beyond LA to sneak a glimpse at a hellish wreck of a planet. Set in the aftermath of a nuclear war, the symptoms of a species sliding into oblivion are everywhere, with a haywire climate, city-sized rubbish dumps and a sea wall of epic proportions. As noted by Gosling in an interview with Wired: “The power of science fiction, and what’s positive about it, is that you’re able to experience the worst-case scenario without actually having to live it.” Villeneuve has brought us a terrifyingly realistic version of civilisation’s possible future.

The film has garnered wide-spread acclaim, and deservedly so. Almost every scene is a visual masterpiece, teasing the viewers with shadows and tricks of the light, as well as breath-taking landscapes. Its haunting score pounds like an irregular heartbeat, reminiscent of the equally powerful soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey. These go a long way to making the film as nail-biting as it is contemplative and spare. But Blade Runner 2049 is ultimately a work of art, and at a whopping 2 hours 43 minute run time, made for people who love cinema, not those after a cheap thrill.

Elizabeth Gibney is a senior reporter on physics for Nature based in London. She tweets at @lizziegibney.

Blade Runner 2049 is on general release.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Women in Medicine: opening the clinic door

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Posted on behalf of Heidi Ledford

Flic Gabbay, xxx, next to a bust of xxx.

Flic Gabbay, co-founder of the Society for Pharmaceutical Medicine, next to a bust of Cicely Saunders, founder of the hospice movement.{credit}John Chase (c) Royal College of Physicians{/credit}

Visitors stepping into the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in London are normally greeted by the sombre stares of imposing men, in portraits lining the walls. From today, women outshine them, in 26 photographic portraits of modern female clinicians ranged along the central stairwell. Each holds an image of a historical figure who inspired them.

The exhibition, Women in Medicine: A Celebration, comes as the RCP — which accredits UK physicians and represents over 30,000 doctors globally — readies for its 500th birthday in 2018. Over that time, it has had just three female presidents: unsurprising, given that women could not join until 1909.

The contemporary clinicians in the portraits are esteemed in their own right, and there is still plenty of trail left for them to blaze. But it is the historical photos that drew my eye.

Fiona Caldicott, xxx, holding a photograph of xxx.

Fiona Caldicott, a past president of the Royal Society of Psychiatrists, holding a photograph of pioneering psychiatrist Helen Boyle.{credit}(c) Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust {/credit}

Recent years have brought a welcome spate of books, movies and exhibitions dedicated to honouring pioneering women in science. The best of these, like the book and film Hidden Figures, draw attention to forgotten achievements and struggles, and reveal a history that had, shockingly, gone untold. More often, such collections tend to sample from the same pantheon. And although Marie Curie and Rosalyn Franklin deserve their fame, I’m often left with the feeling that we are overlooking important contributions from others.

The RCP show steps outside this elite circle. Here is Helen Boyle, one of the first women psychiatrists in Britain, who led the charge for early diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders near the end of the nineteenth century. Holding her photo is Fiona Caldicott, a past president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and perhaps best known for her work on the 1997 Caldicott Report, a guidance document about protecting confidential patient information.

Jane Dacre, xxx

Jane Dacre, Royal College of Physicians president, with a photograph of pioneering hepatologist Sheila Sherlock.{credit}John Chase (c) Royal College of Physicians{/credit}

Jane Dacre, the current president of the RCP, selected physician Sheila Sherlock, who founded hepatology, the study of the liver. According to an online biography connected to the exhibition, Sherlock said that she opted to study that organ because “no one else was doing it”.

All these women racked up notable achievements — and overcame tremendous obstacles to do so. But too many of the write-ups on the accompanying website read like CVs: it is sometimes difficult to glimpse the person behind the achievements, no doubt due to limited space and historical records. Still, there is plenty to whet the appetite. For example, I’m eager to learn more about the friendship with a dying man that led Cicely Saunders to found the modern hospice movement.

Asha Kasliwal, xxx, holds portrait of xxx in the Women in Medicine exhibition at the xxx.

Asha Kasliwal, president of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, with a photograph of Anandibai Gopal Joshi, one of the first women in India to study Western medicine.{credit}(c) FSRH{/credit}

Happily, the exhibition’s brief biography is enough to reveal why Anandibai Gopal Joshi — among the first Indian women to practice Western medicine — chose to enter medicine. Married at age 9 and a mother at 14, Joshi’s child died ten days after he was born due to inadequate medical care. “My soul is moved to help the many who cannot help themselves,” Joshi wrote in her application to the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. (Her photograph is held by Asha Kasliwal, who trained in Mumbai and is now president of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare.)

For perspective, a trip downstairs to the Treasures Room, featuring medical tools from past centuries, is fascinating. Among them is a ‘modesty doll’. In a time when clinicians were all men, women would point to areas on the doll corresponding to the body part in question to describe their symptoms.

In a nearby display case hangs the ornate formal robe, heavy with real gold thread, of the RCP’s president, next to a photo of Dacre wearing it. The robe cannot be shortened, and positioning it on Dacre’s petite frame took some doing. Yet you’d never know it: it fits her perfectly.

Heidi Ledford is a reporter for Nature in London. She tweets at @heidiledford.

Women in Medicine runs at the Royal College of Physicians until 19 January 2018.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.