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Intel To Help Stephen Hawking Communicate Faster
hypnosec writes "Stephen Hawking's ability to communicate has been deteriorating over the years and as it stands, he is only able to communicate at the rate of 1 word per minute. Intel CTO Justin Rattner has revealed that they are working on an interface that will boost the scientist's speech to up to 10 words per minute. Beyond twitching his cheek, Hawking is also capable of other voluntary facial expressions which can be tapped to achieve faster communications with the help of a better character interface and a better word predictor."
They're going to have to enhance the aurocorrect dictionary or it will make complete nonsense of Prof. Hawking's very technical speech.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
He'll be able to do even more awful TV adverts for crappy insurance companies!
Well I suspect principally because a company which builds computer hardware doesn't have a very large bioscience division.
That's all well and good, but what will happen when Hawking dictates a formula that involves division?
It's pity that person that have so many interesting things to say can't communicate normally with other peoples.
There are a lot of people that speak a lot and doesn't have anything interesting to say.
Instead of rehashing 1970s tech, could we PLEASE start understanding how the human body works and why some bodies destroy themselves in this way?
Could you PLEASE stop assuming that there aren't thousands upon thousands of people actively engaged in all areas of medical science trying to do exactly this?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Are they loading the urban dictionary?
Or they could get Hawking one of these. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotiv_Systems A brain computer interface that is available to consumers already. With it they could give him a means of communication even if he loose what little control of his body he has left
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
A quick Youtube search turns up this example of eye-tracking tech for character input. Yeah, it doesn't look to be much faster than Intel's proposed 10 words per minute but that clip is 5 years old and I'm sure it could be improved upon in a number of ways (instead of having to 'hover' over a key for couple seconds for it to confirm, maybe a twitch could be used instead).
Only the other day we saw a demonstration of eye tracking being used with the Windows 8 interface. Something like that would allow him to browse the web, email, take notes, etc.
Instead of rehashing 1970s tech, could we PLEASE start understanding how the human body works and why some bodies destroy themselves in this way?
Could you PLEASE stop assuming that there aren't thousands upon thousands of people actively engaged in all areas of medical science trying to do exactly this?
Could you please explain why one of the most brilliant men of all time is sitting in a 70's era wheel chair using a fucking joystick and his cheek to try and type words when we already have EEG-based headcaps that fucking MONKEYS can use to play goddamn video games?
Seriously man, quit making excuses. Biomedical technology for the disabled is at least 30 years behind CONSUMER technology and at least 50 years behind where it should be. He ought to be walking around his house in a thought- controlled, self-powered exoskeleton right now, and no I'm not joking for even a second. At the very least he should have a head-cap based interface for using his computer system instead of a half-assed muscle-proxy mechanism. And that's with shit that's damn near available at WalMart, no fucking joke.
The state of actual medical research to fix conditions like his is in just as sorry of a state. Companies are too busy pouring cash into penis pills and weight loss drugs to spend R&D money on tailoring targeted DNA rejuvenation treatments. No, it's not just Sci-Fi, or rather it ought not to be, but assholes like you act like this is being feverishly worked on around the clock when in reality nobody is doing a GODDAMN THING.
Pick any two you like: http://www.alscenter.org/als_science/research_projects/index.html
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Name two.
1. Martinovich I., Perito, D., et al.
2. House, P., Greger, B.
Notes:
- these are only two papers that made it into the public media in recent times
- it is a very conservative estimation to assume that each one of them involved the work of tens of peoples
- it is also safe to assume that there are many others that are still "pushing the boundaries of Knowledge" on the matter but are not enough "media-chewable" so they never reach the notoriously sloppy AC's attention
The state of actual medical research to fix conditions like his is in just as sorry of a state. Companies are too busy pouring cash into penis pills and weight loss drugs to spend R&D money on tailoring targeted DNA rejuvenation treatments. No, it's not just Sci-Fi, or rather it ought not to be, but assholes like you act like this is being feverishly worked on around the clock when in reality nobody is doing a GODDAMN THING.
Two points: (1) Do you claim to have a solution that can be implemented? (2) What are YOU doing about curing the diseasse?
I know it is fun to sit at home and bash medical R&D of focusing on weight-loss pills etc. But look at the statistics. About 5000 people in the US have ALS at any given time (and death rate is close to incidence rate of 2/100,000 per year: Citation). So in the US (300 million population) that is 6000 deaths a year. Do you know how many people die due to obesity? Automobile accidents? Heart disease? ALS doesn't even count compared to those: Rank of causes of death.
Just so you know, I would love cures for a lot of diseases to be found (including ALS). But in the real world, companies focus on what makes business sense. Why should the NIH grants/Medical R&D focus on ALS when there are a lot more deaths due to other causes? Because one person who has it is famous? I'm sure there are a lot of smart/famous people (okay, may not be Stephen Hawking type of smart, but talented and contributing to society in other ways) who die of lots of other causes. We don't live entirely in a meritocracy that says Famous Guy's life is worth more than everyone else's and is therefore more deserving of resources.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiGRt9jaxdI
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
It is not enough to have the ability to change the world. It is a rare combination of chance and circumstance, far more than any particular genius. Archimedes could not have formulated the questions that led to quantum electrodynamics. Nor is it fair to select a particular point of inflection out of a continuum of progress -- which discovery since the invention of the transistor is responsible for the processor in your computer?
You judge beyond your ken, and far above your station. I hope that you are ashamed of your comment, but console myself that it will likely receive all the attention that it deserves.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Please tell me you are joking. The reason why I advocate more people buy AMD is because frankly X86 has gotten so incredibly powerful on BOTH sides of the aisle that I think its more important to have competition than to win some benchmark and the difference is like going from insaneo speed to ludicrous speed.
I mean look at some of the chips both have been putting out, even 7 years ago you would have had to spend just insane amounts of money to get anywhere near this performance and now you can get these sub 20w CPUs with multiple cores and GPUs that do full 1080p? Honestly people really need to take a moment to just stop and appreciate how fucking GOOD we have it right now. Hell even the Atom chip when paired with ION made for a pretty decent HTPC that used less power than a first gen P4 doing nothing, now Intel puts out these chips that just get totally incredible amounts of IPC and at an average of only 55w? That is just crazy, hell my Pentium D used more than that just sitting on the fricking desktop doing nothing.
So I would say if anything the slowdown in PC sales and the reason i recommend AMD is because Intel upped the game so damned high that even a low end chip is like a top fuel funny car and just blows through any job your average user can come up with without breaking a sweat. If Intel wouldn't have kept raising the bar with the tick tock cycle I wouldn't be able to buy 6 core CPUs for just $100 or get my customers damned nice laptops for less than $500 delivered.
The amount of power we get today just blows my mind and if you would have told me a decade ago I'd be typing on a website while listening to music, burning a DVD and doing a transcode and NOTHING would lag? Yeah I'd tell you to go back to your Star trek fanfic but here we are, where even the lowest laptop can do 1080P and multitask like crazy and our desktops are just monsters. I predict in 3 years, maybe less, we'll see ARM peter out as they aren't able to scale the IPC while Intel will just scale down a Core2 to where it uses like 2w max and runs rings around the ARM, it'll be like having a supercomputer in your pocket, just incredible.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You got modded down I believe because you made the ridiculous assertion that there is already a cure for ALS-- legalizing marijuana! And that people just refuse to accept it. I assure you that if cannabis was the cure for ALS that so much money would not have been spent helping Hawking cope with ALS rather than just curing him.
One might ask where exactly you got your PHD, and why you havent gotten a government grant yet.
Hawking was the first to make a cosmological model by unifying general relativety and quantum mechanics. That's not easy, Einstein couldn't do it.
What never ceases to amaze me is how we treat such brilliant people. I was surprised to hear how old his equipment is, how difficult it is to keep running, and how little his personal assistants are paid.
I understand he is not a rich man and caretaking is naturally expensive, but I would have expected more goodwill sponsors to come forward, if only for publicity's sake.
If you were a very smart fellow in the 1800's with nothing but the most rudimentary knowledge of electricity, how would you go about understanding something like a portable radio transistor?
Would you have advised the people in the 1700's to just stop thinking about electricity because they lacked fundamental understanding of it? How would that have brought us to where we are now?
Do you think it would be possible to understand the human brain without computers (the cognitive models but especially the computing power needed for modeling) and electronic microscopes? Do you think it would be possible to build computers and electronic microscopes without a deep understanding of electronics (among other things)? And do you think we could get a deep understanding of electronics without the first crude experimentation with naturally occurring and static electricity?
Sure, someone that would write a paper now on how a radio works by reversing engineering the circuit board without understanding the first notions of electronics is an idiot and would be duly ridiculed in the literature. An "inventor" from the 1700's who did experiments with rubbing amber or flying kites into the storm was a genius, someone doing it now would be an amateur at best.
tl;dr: context matters
Remember when he was taking applications for an assistant a while back? One of the requirements was that the individual would be able to repair his tech on-the-spot. Not just replace a keyboard, but do a teardown and get it back up and running again. That's another pretty good reason for him to stick with the tech he's had around for years. They can train the new people as they come in, and you're not playing catchup with new tech.
There are plenty of companies that would quite willingly give him their tech and 24/7 customer support, gratis. Intel has been such a "sponsor" of Hawking for years. However, because this technology must work for him all the time, and because he can't spend his days trying to learn the latest new-fangled thing you want him to try, he himself is slow to adopt new technology. Having a computer freeze up is bad enough for most folks. For him it means he is stranded and speechless until someone checks in on him.
Two points.
But in the real world, companies focus on what makes business sense. Why should the NIH grants/Medical R&D focus on ALS when there are a lot more deaths due to other causes?
Actually, a lot of the basic biomedical and technological groundwork that would be required to treat a condition like ALS using the science-fiction fantasies of the GP would be immensely profitable. If we could really understand how stimuli get in and out of the brain, and come up with neural-computer interfaces that not only restore full mobility to the patients, but allow direct control of computers, the potential applications far exceed treatment of ALS. Most psychiatric disorders would start to become treatable at their root causes (instead of the incredibly crude symptom-based treatment we use today), along with other neurodegenerative disorders, which are already a huge market and will only become more so as we accumulate elderly Western patients. But that's just a start; if we could wire human brains directly to computers, we could vastly increase our productivity, decrease our communications latency, and start to re-define what it means to become human. (It would also have military applications, which is why DARPA is now interested too.) The fact that we haven't done so yet isn't an indication that we're lazy, or that our priorities are misplaced - it just means that human neurobiology is an extraordinarily difficult subject. It really doesn't help when your primary research organism is sentient and has a 20-year-plus reproductive cycle.
Seriously, the entire field of neurobiology is essentially dedicated to figuring out the answers to these kind of questions, and there are thousands of researchers trying to understand neurodegenerative disorders. Everyone would be thrilled if it were as easy as the AC suggests.
For all we know...
Stephen Hawking diagnosed - 1963 Intel founded - 1968
Seems unlikely.
But not impossible. Sounds like an Intel floating point error.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
*correctly