Weekly Progress Report for 06 – 13 July, 2007

The purpose of this memo is to summarize this week’s developments in both N.I.L. research and lab infrastructure.

N.I.L. Research (Motor Cortex)

Description

I am developing the motor cortex vi (motorCortex.vi) component of the NIL Workbench. The purpose of this routine is to take as input the system’s angular requirements (over time) and translate them into realistic neural signals.

Weekly Accomplishments

My studies this week concentrated on constructing the Artificial Cortical Space (ACS). The full scope of research including background material and citations may be found at http://www.obeidlab.com/motor-cortex-simulator.

Lab Infrastructure

Description

I am working to develop the ObeidLab intranet’s structure and documentation. The giga-net will be a self-sustaining entity of computers and users centered on the ‘South’ server with a secure line of communication to the outside world.
South will orchestrate communication between current computers and facilitate the easy insertion of future computers.
South will facilitate user communication and flexibility by offering remote profiles, public and private folders, secure date backup, print spooling, and logon scripting to automate common startup tasks (like drive mapping).
The configuration settings and history may be found at http://obeidlab.com/.

Weekly Accomplishments

Multiple wikis (as listed on http://www.wikimatrix.org/) and one blog () wordpress were evaluated to replace our current wiki (wikimedia).
Criteria:
• Operate on Apache webserver
• Version control History
• Ease of editing
Secondary Criteria:
• Math formatting
• Media inclusion
• Stable version
• Active development community

Of those tested and installed, only two programs were installable and exceeded the initial criteria… DokuWiki and WordPress. We will evaluate both as a group next week.