Student Maps Brain to Image Search

StonyandCher writes to mention that a University of Ottawa grad student is creating a search engine for visual images that will be powered by a system mapped from the human brain. "Woodbeck said he has already created a prototype of the search engine based on his patent, which apes the way the brain processes visual information and tries to take advantage of currently-available graphics processing capabilities in PCs. 'The brain is very parallel. There's lots of things going on at once,' he said. 'Graphics processors are also very parallel, so it's a case of almost mapping the brain onto graphics processors, getting them to process visual information more effectively.'"

Comments

Problem: we don't KNOW how the brain does it

[algorithmagic]

I worked in visual brain research for years, and can vouch there are lots of skeletons in the closet, or elephants in the drawing room: there is no accepted model of the statistics of real images (corners, occlusion, shading), nor of the algorithms necessary to infer them from inputs, nor of the learning process to infer those algorithms. Yes the brain is parallel, and yes it involves robust, fuzzy processing and analog values, but we not only don't know how the brain does it, we don't even know what problem it's trying to solve. The good news is that if this student does indeed have a business model and a real-world problem people will pay to solve, then the ratchet of engineering evolution could give us some real traction into understanding and solving this mystery. Good luck!