There's an ongoing debate among neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and even philosophers as to whether or not we could ever construct or reverse engineer the human brain. Some suggest it's not possible, others argue about the best way to do it, and still others have already begun working on it. Regardless, it's fair to say that ongoing breakthroughs in brain science are steadily paving the way to the day when an artificial brain can be constructed from scratch. And if we assume that cognitive functionalism holds true as a theory -- the idea that our brains are a kind of computer -- there are two very promising approaches worth pursuing. Interestingly, the two approaches come from two relatively different disciplines: cognitive science and neuroscience.

The driverless electric shuttle has begun carrying passengers in a test program in a downtown Las Vegas entertainment district. The driverless electric shuttle has begun carrying passengers in a test program in a downtown Las Vegas entertainment district. The driverless electric shuttle has begun carrying passengers in a test program in a downtown Las Vegas entertainment district. LAS VEGAS (AP) -- There's a new thrill on the streets of downtown Las Vegas, where high- and low-rollers alike are climbing aboard what officials call the first driverless electric shuttle operating on a public U.S. street. The oval-shaped shuttle began running Tuesday as part of a 10-day pilot program, carrying up to 12 passengers for free along a short stretch of the Fremont Street East entertainment district.

"Siri, do I have Parkinson's?" That might sound flippant, but actually new research shows that it's possible to detect Parkinson's symptoms simply by using algorithms to detect changes in voice recordings. Parkinson's, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system, is usually diagnosed through analysis of symptoms along with expensive medical imaging to rule out other conditions--though there is currently no concrete method for detecting it. Max Little, from the University of Oxford, has different ideas. He's been developing software that learns to detect differences in voice patterns, in order to spot distinctive clues associated with Parkinson's.

Ryszard Michalski, PRC Professor of Computational Sciences and Health Informatics, died from cancer on Sept. 20, Provost Peter Stearns announced Tuesday. He joined the Mason faculty in 1988. A memorial will be held at Bellarmine Chapel, 4515 Roberts Road, at 1 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 28. A reception at the same location will follow the service. All members of the university community are invited to attend.

IT'S EVERYONE'S FONDEST DREAM: A COMPUTER THAT WILL do your legal work and won't bill you at $400 an hour. Sorry, it's not about to happen anytime soon. But then there's Frederic Parnon, a former Manhattan litigator who left his firm five years ago to develop software that can be used to give legal advice of sorts. Working from a cramped, nondescript lab above Rockefeller Center, Parnon has spent more than $1 million of his own moneycreating a program called Jnana, which means "knowledge"in Sanskrit. Already, a handful of companies and law firms, such as General Electric, J.P. Morgan and Davis Polk & Wardwell, have bought the program and customized it for their needs. Typically the program is made available to employees through the Internet, allowing them access to advice they aren't getting–or are paying to get from law firms.

Strange but true - a real world mineral with most of the chemical properties of kryptonite has been discovered in Serbia, and now reposes (disguised by the harmless-sounding moniker "jadarite") in the Natural History Museum's mineral hall. Also in the science news this week, Harvard Medical School is conducting experiments that should lead to the development of Six Million Dollar Man-style bionic vision: stimulating the visual centres of the brain and routing the results through a prosthetic eye. Equally startling are the smart retinal implants being developed at the University of Bonn (reported in last week's New Scientist), where sighted users are "training" the software for the ultimate in vision-replacement. The research is medical, but one day, not far off, innovations like this will be giving us wearable computers: the eye that really is a camera; internet access at a blink. It's hardly surprising if the children of the 21st century find it difficult to distinguish between a scientific discovery, this year's new gadget, and utterly fantastic concepts such as the man with the 50s'do, who wears his pants over his tights and flies faster than a speeding bullet.

According to www.ns-5.com, the world's first fully automated domestic assistant is about to go on sale. The Nestor Class 5 robot is six foot tall, looks vaguely human, and can do all sorts of housework, from washing-up to managing your finances. There's just one catch: the website promoting this amazing gadget is just a tease, a clever bit of advertising from 20th Century Fox to promote its movie, I, Robot, which is released in the UK next month. I, Robot is a sci-fi action thriller starring Will Smith, although the real star is the beautifully rendered NS-5 robot. Smith plays a detective investigating the murder of a famous scientist working for the fictional US Robotics company.

In an experiment that opens a new chapter in human-machine interaction, a French research team has demonstrated how a robot can control both its own arm and a person's arm to manipulate objects in a collaborative manner. The robot controls the human limb by sending small electrical currents to electrodes taped to the person's forearm and biceps, which allows it to command the elbow and hand to move. In the experiment, the person holds a ball, and the robot a hoop; the robot, a small humanoid, has to coordinate the movement of both arms to successfully drop the ball through the hoop. The researchers, from the Montpellier Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics, and Microelectronics (known by its French acronym LIRMM), say the approach is still in the proof-of-concept stage, but they are confident that performing more complex tasks is possible. Their goal is to develop robotic technologies that can help people suffering from paralysis and other disabilities to regain some of their motor skills.

The application of Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques for the development of creative systems is a new, exciting and significant area of research. There is a growing interest in the application of these techniques in fields such as: art and music generation, analysis and interpretation; architecture; and design. EvoMUSART 2005 is the third workshop of the EvoNet working group on Evolutionary Music and Art. Following the success of previous events, the main goal of EvoMUSART 2005 is to bring together researchers who are using Evolutionary Computation in this context, providing the opportunity to promote, present and discuss ongoing work in the area. The workshop will include an open panel for the discussion of the most relevant questions of the field.

I am pleased to welcome you to our center. Our mission is to advance the state of the art in intelligent systems through the research and development of intelligent embodied agents such as autonomous robots. Current R&D includes skill learning for humanoid robots, perception learning for mobile robots, and memory structures for task learning for cognitive robots. Our center is collaborating with NASA-Johnson Space Center (Acquisition of Autonomous Behaviors by Robot Assistants), University of Massachusetts (Robot Skill Learning), and The University of Reading, UK (Cognitive Robotics and Control). Currently we are collaborating with the Emergency Department in Vanderbilt University Medical Center (Triage robotic system design and development).