Stephen Downes

As Victor Mair summarizes, "The robot is designed to implant flexible microelectrodes – thinner and softer than a strand of hair – into the cerebral cortex." Having a robot do the work takes us a lot closer to widespread use of brain-computer interfaces (BCI). "Implantable BCI offers powerful benefits such as thought-controlled devices, speech synthesis, and vision restoration for people with disabilities. It also allows scientists to study brain function using high-throughput neural data." The two sources Mair provides are in Chinese, but of course modern browsers can translate the web pages.