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Neuroscientists Offer a Reality Check On Facebook's 'Typing By Brain' Project (ieee.org)
the_newsbeagle writes: Yesterday, Facebook announced that it's working on a "typing by brain" project, promising a non-invasive technology that can decode signals from the brain's speech center and translate them directly to text (see the video beginning at 1:18:00). What's more, Facebook exec Regina Dugan said, the technology will achieve a typing rate of 100 words per minute. Here, a few neuroscientists are asked: Is such a thing remotely feasible? One neuroscientist points out that his team set the current speed record for brain-typing earlier this year: They enabled a paralyzed man to type 8 words per minute, and that was using an invasive brain implant that could get high-fidelity signals from neurons. To date, all non-invasive methods that read brain signals through the scalp and skull have performed much worse. Thomas Naselaris, an assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, says, "Our understanding of the way the words and their phonological and semantic attributes are encoded in brain activity is actually pretty good currently, but much of this understanding has been enabled by fMRI, which is noninvasive but very slow and not at all portable," he said. "So I think that the bottleneck will be the [optical] imaging technology," which is what Facebook's gear will be using.
This is just one of Zuckerberg's many con-schemes to try to stay relevant. Once you've grown a company that much, where do you go if you want to continue to grow your company and maintain your omnipotence?
Is it just me, or isn't my typing this with my fingers "typing by brain"?
Like "brake by wire" isn't really braking with a wire, just a different way of relaying the message and applying the force.
Also, when I read "typing by brain", I couldn't help but imagine opening a skull and comically bashing a brain against a keyboard.
Wait a sec... most of us here can't *think* at 100WPM.
OTOH... it's Facebook, so they're talking about Facebook-typical "content". So then yeah, that sounds feasible.
Those fuddy duddy scientists know nothing. Facebook will make an APP for it. In the Cloud. VR and IoT ready.
Add this to fusion and autonomous cars already on the list of things that are just around the corner!
The T in IoT is either a) some thing very close to, or even in, your brain or b) your brain
From what I learned doing research, I also think 100 words per minute is extreme. You wouldn't believe the artifacts you get just from blinking or moving a leg or finger, and I had a 21 channel MITSAR and WinEEG to work with. The only way this is going to work is if Facebook has plans involving AI and quantum computing, a very dangerous combination for privacy. This is because an AI would have to get to know your brain waves on an incredibly intimate level, making encryption a joke when your brain is getting digitally fingerprinted. If what they say works, both the polygraph test and "truth serum" would be a joke. The only actual application for finding brainwave averages between people currently is to add to the "what are artifacts" knowledge and perhaps a quick and dirty diagnoses. Very rarely have I ever been able to use EEG to find correlations in research because everyone is too different and there is always some kind of confounding variable. Biofeedback projects in EEG sort of works for fun little things, but it's not the same thing as "mind reading" or 100 words per minute good. Now, I've played around with Tobii eye tracking, and that would be their best bet. In the the Linux and open source world we have a program called Dasher that may work with eye tracking to get their quota. Besides, doesn't Facebook have enough biometric data or are their government overlords hungry for more? This is why they'll never go bankrupt, as long as they have projects like this. Meanwhile, other more important research gets cut.
As soon as I read through the article, I immediately experienced some pain in my head. Could be one of the early symptoms of their superior "technology"
I would have had first post, but I used a prototype to type this :(
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Used to sell a brain controlled mouse, IIRC.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
100 words per minutes might be a stretch, but it doesn't sound all that impossible given that the speed record was set with hunt&peck typing by moving a cursor across the screen. Some fancy machine learning that could guess whole words at a time or something along the line should have no problem beating that by quite a margin. It wouldn't even need to be perfect, just close enough, to give a drastic speed up (i.e. like Tab-completion).
See this earlier work that guessed video sequences from brain activity. Getting information in a more 'holistic' form out of the brain instead by just cursor movement seems plausible.
Is everyone finally beginning to understand that Silicon Valley at large is delusional, not nearly as intelligent or competent as they claim to be, and essentially just a bunch of very well funded people that never compared their teenage fantasies to the actual laws of physics? Most of what is happening there is a very expensive joke. It can't last. Their insularity and arrogance WILL relegate them to irrelevance eventually when others that are devoid of this dysfunction step up to the plate elsewhere. It's just a matter of time.
m y s p a c e
love is just extroverted narcissism
I think it's clear we will need implants but so what? Implants will beat carrying around a wallet and a phone everywhere you go. Upgrading will probably suck majorly, but that's the price of progress. Cyborgs are the future boy and girls and we should be happy it's cyborgs and not Terminators though maybe it will be both....
I'm using it wiggle fingers right now foot itches squirrel is it lunch time yet and it works perfectly did I leave the oven on well I smell pizza i can't believe I did that 10 years ago.
Invasive brain implants for everyone!
They should make sure Facebook developers have a brain in the first place. Every piece software developed by FB is pure garbage. Is this some kind of lame attempt to get brainwaves data depending on what FB advertisement users are seing? Besides that BCI input devices have been around for years. He's trying so hard to be Elon Musk.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
Well until we can repeal that pesky first amendment, all the ministry-of-truthing will need to be delegated to private corporations. The fact that such a huge percentage of all human communication and information consumption occurs under the supervision of a tiny handful of megacorporations that for some reason never seem to come under anti-trust scrutiny is merely a pleasant coincidence.
Facebook's users vocabulary is extremely limited. 'Urgh', 'grrr', 'Trump', 'Dirty foreigners(who Doctor my children, design my phones and most of it's apps, gave me my job back because David Somethingstein just bought our dying factory)', 'Ohh Hilary my demigod, your picture I set as my background, smiled at me[faint]', 'Dogs are people too', 'This new berry, that rodents won't even eat, will cure all cancers and raise your loved ones from dead', etc....