Word: neural
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Educated at the Huguenots' Gray Cloister High School in Berlin, where he studied the viola, De Maiziere had to abandon his musical career when he developed a neural impairment in his left arm. He then took up legal studies and eventually became known for his defense of conscientious objectors and other dissidents. Slight of build and speaking with a soft lisp, De Maiziere, 50, is a religious man who has never demonstrated an appetite for public life. But he answered the call when he was asked last fall to cleanse the CDU of the stigma it bore from decades...
...supplement that has a silicon thermometer and the electronics necessary to broadcast instant temperature readings to a recording device. By having a patient swallow the pill, doctors can pinpoint worrisome hot spots anywhere within the digestive tract. Future "smart pills" may transmit information about heart rates, stomach acidity or neural functions. Says Russell Eberhart, program manager at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory: "This could change the way we diagnose and monitor patients...
Perhaps the toughest competition that neural networks will face in the field of artificial intelligence comes from the so-called expert systems used in medicine, banking, navigation and other fields. Instead of looking for patterns, computerized expert systems distill the decision-making process used by human experts into rules of thumb. Neurocomputer researchers argue that neural networks will eventually prove superior, however, because they can adjust more easily to changes in the nature of the problem to be solved...
Others predict that a combination of neural networks and expert systems could solve problems too tough for either to tackle alone. Since natural intelligence consists of several ways of reasoning, the argument goes, computer engineers will have to design artificial intelligence with more than one way of processing information. Says Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0, a computer-industry newsletter: "A neural network will tell the difference between a Russian tank and an American tank, and an expert system will tell whether to shoot...
Despite recent advances, neurocomputing attracts skeptics. Thomas Poggio, head of the Center for Biological Information Processing at M.I.T., insists that proponents of neural networks have exaggerated their computers' smarts. "The only thing they have in common with the human brain is the word neural," he argues. At best, neurocomputers consist of only a few thousand connections -- a very small number compared with the trillions of connections between billions of neurons found in the human brain. "Before trying to duplicate the human brain," Poggio says, "scientists will have to learn far more about the brain than they already know...