In the past decades, interdisciplinary investigations overlapping biology, medicine, information science, and engineering have formed a very exciting and active field that attracts scientists, medical doctors, and engineers with knowledge in different domains. A few examples of such investigations include neural prosthetic implants that aim to improve the quality of life for patients suffering from neurologic disease and injury; brain machine interfaces that sense, analyze, and translate electrical signals from the brain to build closed-loop, biofeedback systems; and fundamental studies of intelligence, cognitive functions, and psychological behaviors correlated to their neurological basis. Although this interdisciplinary area is still in its infancy, it can potentially create some of the most significant impact: treating diseases that are considered untreatable, interpretation and communication of neuron ensembles, or even a revolutionary perception and understanding of life different from philosophical or immaterial approaches. Fortunately, several academic societies recognize the value and impact of this growing field, firmly supporting related research. Such support will drive a booming future in the next twenty or thirty years. Research in this area is frequently project-driven, and the generated knowledge has been scattered in different fields of neuroscience, computation, material and technology, circuits and system, clinical reports, and psychology—the scope considerably across the boundary of traditionally defined disciplines. Neural Computation, Neural Devices, and Neural Prosthesis is intended to assemble such knowledge, from there suggesting a systematic approach guiding future educational and research activities. The targeted audience includes both students and researchers.

Handbook of Neural Computing Applications is a collection of articles that deals with neural networks. Some papers review the biology of neural networks, their type and function (structure, dynamics, and learning) and compare a back-propagating perceptron with a Boltzmann machine, or a Hopfield network with a Brain-State-in-a-Box network. Other papers deal with specific neural network types, and also on selecting, configuring, and implementing neural networks. Other papers address specific applications including neurocontrol for the benefit of control engineers and for neural networks researchers. Other applications involve signal processing, spatio-temporal pattern recognition, medical diagnoses, fault diagnoses, robotics, business, data communications, data compression, and adaptive man-machine systems. One paper describes data compression and dimensionality reduction methods that have characteristics, such as high compression ratios to facilitate data storage, strong discrimination of novel data from baseline, rapid operation for software and hardware, as well as the ability to recognized loss of data during compression or reconstruction. The collection can prove helpful for programmers, computer engineers, computer technicians, and computer instructors dealing with many aspects of computers related to programming, hardware interface, networking, engineering or design.

This book explores the design of ultra wideband (UWB) technology for wireless body-area networks (WBAN). The authors describe a novel implementation of WBAN sensor nodes that use UWB for data transmission and narrow band for data reception, enabling low power sensor nodes, with high data rate capability. The discussion also includes power efficient, medium access control (MAC) protocol design for UWB based WBAN applications and the authors present a MAC protocol in which a guaranteed delivery mechanism is utilized to transfer data with high priority. Readers will also benefit from this book’s feasibility analysis of the UWB technology for human implant applications through the study of electromagnetic and thermal power absorption of human tissue that is exposed to UWB signals.

How can neural and morphological computations be effectively combined and realized in embodied closed-loop systems (e.g., robots) such that they can become more like living creatures in their level of performance? Understanding this will lead to new technologies and a variety of applications. To tackle this research question, here, we bring together experts from different fields (including Biology, Computational Neuroscience, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence) to share their recent findings and ideas and to update our research community. This eBook collects 17 cutting edge research articles, covering neural and morphological computations as well as the transfer of results to real world applications, like prosthesis and orthosis control and neuromorphic hardware implementation.

This second edition presents the enormous progress made in recent years in the many subfields related to the two great questions : how does the brain work? and, How can we build intelligent machines? This second edition greatly increases the coverage of models of fundamental neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience, and neural network approaches to language. (Midwest).

This book focuses on neuro-engineering and neural computing, a multi-disciplinary field of research attracting considerable attention from engineers, neuroscientists, microbiologists and material scientists. It explores a range of topics concerning the design and development of innovative neural and brain interfacing technologies, as well as novel information acquisition and processing algorithms to make sense of the acquired data. The book also highlights emerging trends and advances regarding the applications of neuro-engineering in real-world scenarios, such as neural prostheses, diagnosis of neural degenerative diseases, deep brain stimulation, biosensors, real neural network-inspired artificial neural networks (ANNs) and the predictive modeling of information flows in neuronal networks. The book is broadly divided into three main sections including: current trends in technological developments, neural computation techniques to make sense of the neural behavioral data, and application of these technologies/techniques in the medical domain in the treatment of neural disorders.

Nanobiomaterials: Nanostructured materials for biomedical applications covers an extensive range of topics related to the processing, characterization, modeling, and biomedical applications of nanostructured ceramics, polymers, metals, composites, self-assembled materials, and macromolecules. Novel approaches for bottom-up and top-down processing of nanostructured biomaterials are highlighted. In addition, innovative techniques for characterizing the in vitro behavior and in vivo behavior of nanostructured biomaterials are considered. Applications of nanostructured biomaterials in dentistry, drug delivery, medical diagnostics, surgery and tissue engineering are examined. - Provides a concise description of the materials and technologies used in the development of nanostructured biomaterials - Provides industrial researchers with an up-to-date and handy reference on current topics in the field of nanostructured biomaterials - Includes an integrated approach that is used to discuss both the biological and engineering aspects of nanostructured biomaterials

High-Performance Computing using FPGA covers the area of high performance reconfigurable computing (HPRC). This book provides an overview of architectures, tools and applications for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (HPRC). FPGAs offer very high I/O bandwidth and fine-grained, custom and flexible parallelism and with the ever-increasing computational needs coupled with the frequency/power wall, the increasing maturity and capabilities of FPGAs, and the advent of multicore processors which has caused the acceptance of parallel computational models. The Part on architectures will introduce different FPGA-based HPC platforms: attached co-processor HPRC architectures such as the CHREC’s Novo-G and EPCC’s Maxwell systems; tightly coupled HRPC architectures, e.g. the Convey hybrid-core computer; reconfigurably networked HPRC architectures, e.g. the QPACE system, and standalone HPRC architectures such as EPFL’s CONFETTI system. The Part on Tools will focus on high-level programming approaches for HPRC, with chapters on C-to-Gate tools (such as Impulse-C, AutoESL, Handel-C, MORA-C++); Graphical tools (MATLAB-Simulink, NI LabVIEW); Domain-specific languages, languages for heterogeneous computing(for example OpenCL, Microsoft’s Kiwi and Alchemy projects). The part on Applications will present case from several application domains where HPRC has been used successfully, such as Bioinformatics and Computational Biology; Financial Computing; Stencil computations; Information retrieval; Lattice QCD; Astrophysics simulations; Weather and climate modeling.

The two-volume set LNCS 5601 and LNCS 5602 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Work-Conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation, IWINAC 2009, held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in June 2009. The 108 revised papers presented are thematically divided into two volumes. The first volume includes papers relating the most recent collaborations with Professor Mira and contributions mainly related with theoretical, conceptual and methodological aspects linking AI and knowledge engineering with neurophysiology, clinics and cognition. The second volume contains all the contributions connected with biologically inspired methods and techniques for solving AI and knowledge engineering problems in different application domains.

Transhumanisms and Biotechnologies in Consumer Society offers new, critical perspectives on the impact of 'life-enhancing' technological advancements on consumer identity positions and market evolutions. Technoprogressive innovations that include body modification technologies and reproductive technologies have enabled people to transcend bodily constraints. In parallel, they provoke necessary, critical interrogation around human capabilities, technological possibilities, gender equality, feminism, personal identity, bioethics, markets and morality. The contributions in this book re-evaluate these topics and elucidate some of the vexed relationships between consumers of biotechnologies and markets they consider restrictive or misleading. Secondly, by illustrating consumers’ questioning of and resistance to biomedical, market imperatives, they highlight how the notion of consumer sovereignty, consumer influence over markets, has now advanced into novel forms of consumer activism made manifest through contemporary health justice movements. The chapters in this book also uncover profoundly personal consumer accounts on coping with and managing bodies-in-transition, focusing on illness, self-perception, survivorship and the vicissitudes of these corporeal experiences. This book will allow readers to understand how accelerated technological market changes are being experienced and creatively countered at the societal and individual level. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Marketing Management.