Unsolved problems of neuroscience:

• Awareness: What is the neuronal basis of subjective experience, wakefulness, alertness, arousal and attention? What is its function?
• Perception: How does the brain transfer sensory information into coherent, private percepts? What are the rules by which perception is organized? What are the features/objects that constitute our perceptual experience of internal and external events? How are the senses integrated? Is face perception special (e.g. inert)? What is the relationship between subjective experience and the physical world?
• Learning and Memory: Where do our memories get stored and how are they retrieved again? How can learning be improved? What is the difference between explicit and implicit memories? How plastic is the mature brain?
• Development: How and why did the brain evolve (the way it did)? What are the molecular determinants of individual brain development?
• Sleep: What is the function of sleep? Why do we dream? What are the underlying brain mechanisms? What is its relation to anesthesia?
• Cognition and Decisions: How and where does the brain evaluate reward value and effort (cost) to modulate behavior? How does previous experience alter perception and behavior? What are the genetic and environmental contributions to brain function?
• Language: How is it implemented neurally? What is the basis of semantic meaning?
• Diseases: What are the neural bases (causes) of mental diseases like psychotic disorders (e.g. mania, schizophrenia), Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease or addiction? Is it possible to recover loss of sensory or motor function?

"Ten Unsolved Questions of Neuroscience", an upcoming book by David Eagleman and Patricia Churchland, presents a similar list (I couldn't find any more information about this book other than what's mentioned here):

• How is information coded in neural activity?
• How are memories stored and retrieved?
• How do brains balance plasticity against retention?
• What is the brain’s extensive baseline activity about?
• How should we neurally characterize emotions?
• What is intelligence?
• How is time managed in nervous systems?
• Why do brains sleep and dream?
• How do the highly specialized subsystems of the brain coordinate with one another?
• What is the neural substrate of consciousness?

I have my own list of questions to think about.

Artificial eyes to "monitor areas over 360°" (I wish I knew how area over 360° looks like) in real time, touch sensors that allow feel out the likeness of Abraham Lincoln on a penny, and alcohol-powered muscles that are 100 times stronger than natural muscles, able to do 100 times greater work per cycle and produce, at reduced strengths, larger contractions than natural muscles. What's next?

[via Robots.net and Cognitive Daily]

Microsoft just announced Microsoft Robotics Studio -- a Windows-based environment that includes robotics development platform and lightweight services oriented runtime. The Studio provides simulation runtime and relies on the web services application model to interact with available services (this is especially close to my heart as the two books that I co-authored for O'Reilly were about webservices).

The toolkit currently supports LEGO Mindstorms (both RCX and NXT) and Fischertechnik interfaces.

The discussion group that covers Robotics Studio already has several interesting threads. From one of the messages (slightly edited for presentability); unfortunately I don't see any way to link to a particular message, but you can search for several "Absolute Horror" messages:

Robotics Studio will take your focus OFF the real problem - how to integrate timing into your design. Time is THE most important thing when you design a robot. You can have a dumb cap and resistor running the whole show as in Beam robotics and get great results. The further you abstract your framework and the more you rely on the simulation the more damage you will do to the community. What we really need is a BUS not a framework. And a way to hook up that bus to a PC. We do not need a framework without a bus. Robotics Studio is trying to create a distributed environment where timing will be explicit. These concepts are only applicable to the simple machines most people mistakenly call robots -- these are NOT robots. These are toys. [...] Instead learn the following:

• Everything you can get your hands on regarding oscillations and timing related to oscillations. Forget about traditional NNs - they are made of Layers (just like Ogres - watch shrek 1 for a good explanation) If they weren't made of layers (backpropagation is only good for non-temporal patterns) they just might work... Statistics (corrleation especially). Embodyment. Compliance. Types of learning (Supervised, Unsupervised, Reinforced). Hardware such as Bus design, servos, H-bridges, sensors. Forget PID control - your bot has to learn it otherwise it will not integrate well with the rest of the system.
• One thing I want to tell about amature robotics - the only way you get a complex behaviour is by increasing the number of actuators/sensors. The only way you can do it is by making the devices more affordable. The only way you can do that is by making the devices simpler and standardizing them. Robotics Studio wants to add XML processing to devices which contain 25-128 bytes of ram such as pics... and waist my precious CPU cycles on parsing it. I got one word: forgettaboutit.

Cofing4Fun also has a page dedicated to programming for LEGO Mindstorms (although no articles that cover the new NXT version yet). All this should run on top of Visual Studio Express, which is free.