Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell Appear on CBS 60 Minutes
Last Sunday I wrote about the computational neuroscience work by Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell. Well, the CBS 60 Minutes feature was really quite interesting. In the segment, one of the staff members for the 60 Minutes crew was shown 10 words while her brain was scanned via MRI. When these 10 words were shown along with 10 other words, the computer system by Marcel and Tom successfully chose the correct ones.
Here is the 60 Minutes segment.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette also has done their own online video segment on this work.
In talking to Tom about this, he mentioned that one of the most interesting aspects of this research was not reported by 60 Minutes, namely that they can now predict neural activity for new words, based on how the word is used in a trillion-word corpus of text.
Pretty amazing.
Peter Lee @ January 7, 2009
I wonder if there is some theory which proves that the patterns in brain of all human beings are similar when they are thinking about the same item. If its true then its amazing, if not then this technology cannot be used as an evidence.
[…] Tom is the Head of the Machine Learning Department and also holds a faculty appointment in the Computer Science Department. Recently, he has been working with Marcel Just on machine learning applications in computational neuroscience. A particularly amazing outcome of this research has been the ability to have a computer “read” brain scans (produced via functional magnetic resonance imaging) and determine, with extremely high accuracy, what word the test subject is thinking about. A demonstration of this amazing research was featured on the CBS program, “60 Minutes,” last January. You can watch that 60 Minutes segment here. […]