Indian scientists bridge audio divide By Raja Murthy
MUMBAI - An Indian American duo at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) has created new technology based on the greatest engineering feat of
nature - the human mind-body structure. Their invention, the Radio Frequency
Cochlea, will not only enable a new generation of wireless Internet and
communication technologies, but will also serve as a reminder of just how much
civilization owes to the inner ear and ancient Asian powers of memory.
Indian American scientists Rahul Sarpeshkar and Soumyajit Mandal have merged
human evolution with 21st century technology in their new invention - a
high-speed, ultra-broadband, low-power radio chip that works on the same
principles as the
human inner ear, or cochlea.
Their invention, which they filed for patent as the Radio Frequency Cochlea (RF
Cochlea), will usher in the next generation of wireless Internet, cell phone,
radio and TV devices, and inevitably impact a US$2 trillion global media and
entertainment industry with more advanced sound gizmos.
More immediately, the RF Cochlea will vastly improve radio frequency spectrum
in the newly dawning technology of cognitive and smart radios - vital devices
that automatically make better use of unused frequencies in our increasingly
bandwidth-crowded world.
Sarpeshkar, a well-known professor of electrical engineering at the MIT and his
graduate student Mondal, designed the 1mm by 3 mm RF Cochlea chip that is
faster and more energy efficient than any currently working in radio-frequency
(RF) spectrum analyzers [1].
More significantly, the RF Cochlea opens a fascinating new frontier of
technology: living aid devices popping out of science blending with millions of
years of human evolution. We could be entering an era of humanology, or more
holistic technology uniting two or more disciplines of humanity-related
knowledge.
Sarpeshkar told Asia Times Online that his invention has been
"enthusiastically" received. "For the first time, we have technology that
bridges the working of the human ear with the working of radio," he said.
That professionals involved with hearing having earlier had no working
connection with those involved in radio technology sounds incredible. But it
demonstrates how obviously related disciplines have been developing on parallel
but separate tracks, until Sarpeshkar and his MIT team appeared. More
disciplines could similarly and beneficially converge.
Sarpeshkar acknowledged that engineers could learn much from the greatest
engineering device known yet to humans: the human mind-body structure.
While Mother Nature's technology is still leagues ahead of the variety created
by humans, Sarpeshkar was inspired by nature's design concepts that have
evolved over eons.
"Humans have a long way to go before their architectures will successfully
compete with those in nature, especially in situations where
ultra-energy-efficient or ultra-low-power operations are paramount," he said in
a MIT media release dated June 3. "Nevertheless, we can mine the intellectual
resources of nature to create devices useful to humans, just as we have mined
her physical resources in the past."
Sarpeshkar and Mondal used the same design principles in the human ear to
create the RF Cochlea. The device captures radio frequencies a million times
higher than the 100 Hz (100 wave cycles per second) to 100,000 Hz that the
human ear captures. It includes radio signals for most commercial wireless
applications.
In Sarpeshkar's RF Cochlea, human-made inductors imitate the work of fluid mass
in the ear, capacitors replicate ear membranes and active radio frequency
amplifiers do the work of the outer hair cells in the ear that carry audio as
electrical signals to the brain.
"The outer human ear acts as the radio antenna," Sarpeshkar explained to Asia
Times Online, "the middle ear sifts through the substance from unwanted noise
and the inner ear, or cochlea, is the amplifier and separates frequencies
before sending signals to the brain."
As Sarpeshkar pointed out, RF Cochlea represents not merely a more holistic
blending of human technology with nature's engineering, of merging biology with
advanced electronics, but it also gives insights about the sense of hearing, a
faculty fundamental to the development of civilizations.
That the inner ear and the evolving human mind are inter-dependent is obvious
with the ancient world's richest treasures of wisdom first preserved and passed
on across millennia through the inner cochlea hearing the spoken word, not eyes
reading written script, and storing those words accurately in powerful memory.
The sensory impact the inner ear has on the mind becomes evident in how great
oratory mesmerizes more than a great essay, or the way great music captivates
and changes moods more than great prose. In his famous dialogues of Phaedrus
(360 BC), ancient Greek teacher Plato too argues of the superiority of the
spoken over the written word.
Sarpeshkar's South Asian origin fits with the ancient regional tradition of the
heard and memorized word, via the inner cochlea, protecting old world knowledge
and wisdom from invading culture destroyers burning libraries, books and
manuscripts. The connection between the inner ear and memory can make
fascinating scientific study.
"While the textual riches of Alexandria, China and Rome were being put to the
flame, a wholly different tradition of scientific expression was brought to a
peak in India, in a manner that would prove enormously more resilient to the
vicissitudes of time and adversity," observed Alok Kumar, Department of
Physics, State University of New York. "This was the oral, poetic tradition of
Indian thought, whose greatest purveyor in astronomy and mathematics was
Aryabhata."
Mathematician astronomer Aryabhata (born 476 AD), after whom India named its
first satellite launched in April 19, 1975, composed the Aryabhatiya, a
remarkable astronomy and mathematical work in poetic form. "There are no
numbers anywhere in Aryabhata's composition in Sanskrit language, nor are there
figures, drawings, or equations," wrote Kumar in his project note for the New
Jersey, Princeton-based Educational Council on Indic Traditions organization
that commissioned him to study ancient Indian contributions to science. "The
Aryabhatiya expresses the highly sophisticated mathematics of sine functions,
volumetric determinations, calculation of celestial latitudes and motions, and
much more, in the form of a poetic code."
Inputs through the inner cochlea and advanced powers of memory preserved a more
priceless treasure, the Buddha's teaching of Dhamma, or universal laws of
nature, that detailed a non-sectarian path for freedom from all suffering - by
objectively observing the constantly changing mind-matter phenomena within,
manifesting at the bio-chemical level as bodily sensations arising and passing
away, instead of blindly reacting to whatever we experience in the outside
world.
The entire 82,000 discourses of the Buddha and related commentaries in Pali,
one of the oldest known languages, were memorized and their authenticity
confirmed in historic congregations of monks such as the Chatta Sanghayana or
Sixth Council held in Yangon, Burma, between 1954 and 1956.
The First Council was convened in 544 BC, in the Sattapaaai Cave located
outside Rajagaha, northern India, three months after the Buddha passed away. It
was only during the Fourth Council held in Tambapanni, Sri Lanka, in 29 BC
under King Vattagamani's patronage, that the voluminous Tipitaka [2] texts
containing the Buddha’s teachings and related commentaries were committed to
written script on palm leaves.
In the Chatta Sanghayana or Sixth Council in Burma, 2,500 learned monks from
Myanmar, Cambodia, India, Laos, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam recited
the entire 82,000 discourses and related commentaries that they had heard and
committed to memory, as did generations of monks across two millennia.
"An European spectator would have marveled at this preternatural feat, but it
[extraordinary powers of memory of the heard word] is a commonplace occurrence
in this area of the world," wrote a leading Sri Lankan scholar Harischandra
Kaviratna in his 1971 essay "Unbroken Chain of Oral Tradition".
Sarpeshkar's RF Cochlea marks the latest milestone in the evolutionary journey
of human hearing and civilization, a path that transcends a distance from 544
BC when the Buddha's personal attendant Ananda narrated to the First Council
the entire discourses he heard from the Buddha, word for word. Ananda started
every repeated discourse with the words in Pali "evam me suttam",
meaning "Thus, have I heard [from the Enlightened One]".
"As in all interdisciplinary fields, it is important to synergistically combine
the creativity and excitement generated by new non-traditional thinking with
the discipline and knowledge of older ideas," said Sarpeshkar who calls the
biological inner ear an "amazing custom analog computer".
"The cochlea quickly gets the big picture of what's going on in the sound
spectrum," said Sarpeshkar. "The more I started to look at the ear, the more I
realized it's like a super-radio with 3,500 parallel channels."
Forty-year-old Sarpeshkar was born and brought up in Bangalore before he left
for the US as an under-graduate student. He holds over 20 patents, has authored
more than 70 publications and ranks among the world's most brilliant young
scientists from South Asia. His several awards include the Packard Fellow
award, given to outstanding young faculty, and the Indus Technovator Award,
which MIT instituted in 2003, for distinguished young innovators of South Asian
origin working at the confluence of technology research and entrepreneurship.
After obtaining his degree in Electrical Engineering and Physics at MIT and his
PhD at Caltech, Sarpeshkar joined the technical staff at Bell Labs, Biological
Computation department within its physics division. Since 1999, he has served
in MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty, leading a
research group on analog VLSI and biological systems that works on developing
what it calls "low-power brain-machine interfaces".
The cosmopolitan Analog VLSI MIT team reflects the kind of international talent
that MIT hopes to nurture in country specific programs it has operated since
1994 in China, Japan, Israel, India, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Spain.
Sarpeshkar's MIT team, for instance, includes Scott Arfin, Benjamin Rapoport,
Lorenzo Turicchia, Micah O'Halloran from the US; Serhii M. Zhak from the Moscow
Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia; Soumyajit Mandal from the Indian
Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Keng-Hoong Wee from Tohoku University,
Japan; and Woradorn Wattanapanitch from Thailand.
So far, their brain-machine interfaces work to combine the human physical
structure and 21st century technology has produced:
A new generation of high performance, low-power devices that mimic the
communicating relationship of the mind, brain and human limbs, to help
paralysis patients, the blind, and victims of Parkinson's disease and epilepsy.
These ultra-low power brain-machine devices can run for 10 years or more,
compared to current bulky devices that are 100-10,000 times more power and
often lack wireless capabilities.
The Bionic Ear project to design advanced ultra-low-power cochlear-implant
systems that also enable the deaf to hear music and tonal languages such as
Chinese and other East Asian languages. Tonal languages use variations in tone,
or pitch, to express different meanings of words. For example, the Mandarin
word "ba" can be used with four different intonations to mean "eight",
"to uproot", "to hold" and "a harrow". In contrast, English is a stress or
accent-oriented language.
"Biological systems have developed over hundreds of millions of years of
evolution to perform sensory, motor and chemical tasks extremely efficiently
and robustly while using very little power, in very little volumes, and in real
time," said Sarpeshkar, who sees his research as just the beginning of a
journey for many more efficient, adaptable and cost-effective technologies to
be developed from biology.
The RF Cochlea device demonstrates what can happen when researchers take
inspiration from fields outside their own, said Sarpeshkar. "Healthcare is a
natural area for applying biologically inspired technologies since we are
trying to engineer systems that perform the normal functions of biological
ones, so mimicking the biology can be helpful in fixing it."
Sarpeshkar's work also reflects the rewards that come by way of those daring to
walk the rarely trodden path. "I have followed my heart in my work, and in my
love for science," he said.
Notes
1. Spectrum analyzers, one of the key devices supporting our
technology-dependent existence, are used in making radio frequencies work
optimally for a range of uses from wireless phones, air traffic control, global
positioning systems, radio-controlled toys to space stations.
2. The Tipitaka, or three baskets, refers to the Vinaya Pitaka (code of conduct
for monks and nuns), Sutta Pitaka (discourses) and Abhidhamma Pitaka
(intricate, profound treatises on the constantly changing mind-matter phenomena
as experienced within). The Tipitaka contains over 24 million characters in
modern script in over 40 printed volumes.
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