Any unemployed Computational Neuroscientists around?

[itma]

There is a "£1 million" research project on "Computational Modelling of the Honeybee Brain" (as reported by the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19799806) and they are recruiting ...

The way that bees smell and see is being studied in a £1m project to produce a simulation of the insect's sensory systems.

The simulated bee brain will then be used by a flying robot to help it make decisions about how to navigate safely.

Robots that emerge from the research project could help in search and rescue missions or work on farms mechanically pollinating crops.

The research, which involves scientists from the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex, aims to create models of the neural systems in a bee's brain that helps it make sense of what it sees and smells.

The working model of the sensory systems will then be used in a robot to see if it can move around the world with the sophistication of a honey bee.

...

There are posts available at both Sheffield and Sussex.
http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/J.Marshall/lab/Join_Us.html
Dr Marshall is the co-ordinator http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/J.Marshall/james.html

Now, call me out of touch and all that, but I actually believed that the essential preliminary to emulating something was to fully understand the system under study.
And I didn't think we were quite there yet.

However Dr Marshall clearly is not short of courage.
Just last year he delivered a lecture entitled "Optimal Collective Decision-Making in Honeybees: Novel Insights for Psychology and Neuroscience?" - at Princeton, which might be seen as getting right into Seeley's territory ...


/ and I would also add that the "Search and Rescue" and "Mechanical crop polination" justifications do seem to be a bit far off into the future.
Still, getting a £1m grant deserves real respect ... ... when there is so little money available for research into real bees ...

 

[TBRNoTB]

There is a "£1 million" research project on "Computational Modelling of the Honeybee Brain" (as reported by the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19799806) and they are recruiting ...

There are posts available at both Sheffield and Sussex.
http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/J.Marshall/lab/Join_Us.html
Dr Marshall is the co-ordinator http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/J.Marshall/james.html

Now, call me out of touch and all that, but I actually believed that the essential preliminary to emulating something was to fully understand the system under study.
And I didn't think we were quite there yet.

However Dr Marshall clearly is not short of courage.
Just last year he delivered a lecture entitled "Optimal Collective Decision-Making in Honeybees: Novel Insights for Psychology and Neuroscience?" - at Princeton, which might be seen as getting right into Seeley's territory ...


/ and I would also add that the "Search and Rescue" and "Mechanical crop polination" justifications do seem to be a bit far off into the future.
Still, getting a £1m grant deserves real respect ... ... when there is so little money available for research into real bees ...

read spy drones (no pun intended,... ok it was!) for the military!

 

[farbee]

There is a "£1 million" research project on "Computational Modelling of the Honeybee Brain" (as reported by the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19799806) and they are recruiting ...

There are posts available at both Sheffield and Sussex.
http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/J.Marshall/lab/Join_Us.html
Dr Marshall is the co-ordinator http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/J.Marshall/james.html

Now, call me out of touch and all that, but I actually believed that the essential preliminary to emulating something was to fully understand the system under study.
And I didn't think we were quite there yet.

However Dr Marshall clearly is not short of courage.
Just last year he delivered a lecture entitled "Optimal Collective Decision-Making in Honeybees: Novel Insights for Psychology and Neuroscience?" - at Princeton, which might be seen as getting right into Seeley's territory ...


/ and I would also add that the "Search and Rescue" and "Mechanical crop polination" justifications do seem to be a bit far off into the future.
Still, getting a £1m grant deserves real respect ... ... when there is so little money available for research into real bees ...

Interesting stuff and a very hot area of science hence the ability to get funding. Suspect the actual link to bee brain function is rather tenuous however.

 

[rogerlouis]

There is a "£1 million" research project on "Computational Modelling of the Honeybee Brain" (as reported by the BBC )

This is a really fascinating piece of research. I believe that the idea is to model what we think we know about honeybee behaviour and make predictions. If the predictions aren't quite right, the model would be repeatedly refined. So we don't need to fully understand the processes before starting to produce models.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were to be a military spin-off !

rogerlouis

 

[DaveJNeal]

"and I would also add that the "Search and Rescue" and "Mechanical crop polination" justifications do seem to be a bit far off into the future. "

fab - competition for the bees for pollen - thats just what we need, it's worked so well in other areas ( the trains, nhs, etc, etc )

;-)

D

 

[drstitson]

bees have <1 million neurons and 10^7 synapses so modeling a neural network isn't unfeasible given what google managed earlier this year:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18595351

or

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/...le-turns-computers-into-a-moron-2012062732123

 

[alanf]

...I would also add that the "Search and Rescue" and "Mechanical crop polination" justifications do seem to be a bit far off into the future.
Still, getting a £1m grant deserves real respect ...when there is so little money available for research into real bees ...

Doesn't seem credible, does it?

Before now, [Dr Marshall] said, many of the attempts to recreate biological brains in silicon have focused on the cognitive systems found in humans, monkeys and mice.

"But," he said, "simpler organisms such as social insects have surprisingly advanced cognitive abilities."...

"Because the honey bee brain is smaller and more accessible than any vertebrate brain, we hope to eventually be able to produce an accurate and complete model that we can test within a flying robot," said Dr Marshall.

That's an interesting message. The research posts are all in the Department of Computing/Infomatics. The search and rescue speculation may be a PR line, the stuff about pollinating crops could be no more than speculation from a journalist.

Money so far for autonomous vehicles arises mostly from the military interest in autonomous vehicles. There are billions being invested in unmanned drones but they are currently controlled remotely by humans thousands of miles away. It's a frequently reported aim that autonomous navigation and hazard evasion techniques need to get beyond the delay of remote control.

Channel 4 covers a report that:

the UK has spent a further £1,031m on developing new drones such as the Watchkeeper UAV and BAE Systems Taranis drone.

And it estimates that Britain has funded £120m of research within universities and British defence companies looking at unmanned systems.

Is that a related funding source? Looks like honey bee navigation could be a convenient model to simulate and test UAV theories, but there's not a lot in it for the bees.