[HN Gopher] A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pn... ___________________________________________________________________ A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia Author : kartben_ Score : 284 points Date : 2022-02-17 14:18 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (blog.benjamin-cabe.com) (TXT) w3m dump (blog.benjamin-cabe.com) | alexk307 wrote: | This is what happens when you give children the tools to succeed | by teaching them math and science in ways that directly relate to | their world view. Obviously, this kid is very bright, but giving | kids the tools to understand how the ideas they're learning can | be applied in the real world is so satisfying. They aren't | blinded by previous failures, or the current market, or what can | and can't be done. | mrits wrote: | Sometimes you give the children these tools and they decide to | do something they are more interested in. It is important to | realize that not all children are interested in sciences. | alexk307 wrote: | Of course, no one should be forced to make things. But a lot | of kids are naturally curious and can look at things in ways | that are not obvious to adults. | cute_boi wrote: | But, by the law of nature, not all kids are prodigy. The | normal distribution curve still holds, and the current | society is putting too much pressure on them. Last time I | visited India, I was shocked that parents were forcing | their kids to learn IIT related thing in class 6. I | encountered same thing in US, where kids were being | prepared for competitive exams like SAT etc... Parents | expect their children should go to prestigious universities | like MIT and standford. The case is worst in China. | Mezzie wrote: | You shouldn't do this to prodigies either. | | I was one and honestly I'm really happy my parents were | neglectful (in the legal sense); my peers at award | dinners might have had their university and career plans | set out by 12, but none of them struck me as happy or | emotionally healthy people, and the older I get the more | I'm thinking that turning our smartest kids into robots | or sociopaths is a bad idea. | alexk307 wrote: | Just curious, what were you a prodigy at? | Mezzie wrote: | I was a hyperlexic kid + a mental calculator who was a | child programmer. | | At the age of 6, I was reading at the level of a college | graduate, and I started coding in elementary school; I | taught my first intro to programming class when I was 11. | | My middle-school standardized test scores put me in the | top .03 percent and my IQ was tested to be in the | mid-140s. | | So I think I would count by most metrics, barely. | (Nothing quite like going to dinners for the top 200 | whatever and knowing you're number 199 or so ha). | | I'm also a mental basketcase who developed MS in my 20s, | so while I've done pretty well for myself so far, I don't | have the personality, dedication, or temperament for | great success. There are just a lot of things from my | childhood that really make me raise an eyebrow now as an | adult. | | The amount of pressure is terrible, of course, but in | addition to that, there's this weird push and pull where | a lot of adults will say out of one side of their mouth | how special you are and hold you to standards that are | unreasonable for children and accept you + your | contributions if they're helpful, but the minute you have | your own opinion or disagree, you're a child and | obviously don't know anything. | | I'm a lost cause for society, intellectually speaking, | but I feel concerned for the me born in 2015. | alexk307 wrote: | Do you need to be a prodigy to wire up sensors and | controllers? More pressure to learn how modern technology | works? That should be a great thing. | | This exactly is the issue: not all kids are geniuses and | not all kids are morons, but you'll NEVER know if you | treat them like you think they deserve to be treated. If | you believe that kids can't understand complex things, | they of course won't because you won't explain it to | them. | wizzwizz4 wrote: | There's a difference between _allowing_ people to learn | what they 're interested in, and _forcing_ them to cram | for standardised tests. The first one is the best thing | that ever happened to me, and the second is among the | worst. (I was the one forcing myself, but the point still | applies.) | sam0x17 wrote: | That said, every single kid who I knew growing up who had | access to these sorts of opportunities but did something | "more interesting" has ended up regretting it in adulthood. | This probably isn't true across the board, but among the | people I know it definitely is. | rhexs wrote: | Maybe. It's more like it's what a kid's parents do when kids | can no longer be kids and are driven to start working on their | college applications earlier and earlier. | | There's more to life than getting into MIT. | foolinaround wrote: | If the kid was innately driven to do this, a big win for the | kid and for humanity... | | On the other hand, if the kid is 'coached' to look/identify, | as you say, it is a sad state of affairs when kids are pushed | into adulthood too soon... | | We have seen this for more than a decade also with the | marketing practices around sexualization of fashion for | younger and younger kids... | kartben_ wrote: | To briefly clarify on why I believe it is the former: Caleb | just happened to have caught a really bad fungal pneumonia | when he was 9yo, and that was his inspiration to explore | what could be done to diagnose things differently. And he | just happened to do tons of research to try and re-use open | source technology, etc. | alexk307 wrote: | There's more to making electronics than getting into MIT and | prestigious universities. I think a lot of the users on HN | like myself enjoy creating things just to create them. I | don't need prestige or accolades; just build something, break | it, fix it, take it apart. Some people enjoy learning how | things work. | honkycat wrote: | I am not skeptical of the kid being able to do this. Good for | them! I'm sure they will grow up to be an inquisitive and | brilliant member of society. | | However, like many, I feel like this article could be papering | over... something. | | OK I'll just say it: Privilege. | | And hey! Not every kid with privilege ends up being brilliant! | And he may not be privileged! But it is a lot easier to succeed | when you have it. | | And my problem with this article is this: We are constantly | papering over how much of a difference a good education can make, | and how little opportunity to get that quality of education there | is in the United States. | | You often see people bemoaning their lot in life: "Ugh. When Mark | Zuckerburg/Bill Gates/insert CEO was my age, they already started | Microsoft!" | | And my reply to this sentiment is this: How many hundreds of | thousands of dollars did your parents spend on your pre- | university education? I'm willing to bet it wasn't in the | hundreds of thousands. | | I see this kid is from LA. Sometimes all it takes is being in the | right zip code to have access to... science fairs? My school | didn't even have AP classes! I thought science fairs were | something that only happened on TV. | | I realize this is a bit petty, and it 100% comes from my | childhood where I went to a poor rural school where I was a poor | student, and so-fucking-desperately wanted more, and then moved | to the city, and succeeded, flourished once I got access to a | better quality of education. But pretending it isn't there feels | dishonest. | | It feels like an onion article headline: "Kid with everything | going for him, despite all odds, tremendously succeeds" | inglor_cz wrote: | "I realize this is a bit petty" | | It is, and very American-centric. Plenty of innovative people | are born in poorer countries with much less resources at their | disposal. Indeed quite a lot of American top scientists are | immigrants from not exactly rich places. | | Of course, even they are sort-of privileged by the fact that | they weren't born blind, on in a period of outright war, or | didn't get cancer at the age of three. But this is already | stretching the meaning of "privilege". | | Katalin Kariko, one of the main brains behind mRNA, grew up in | shabby Communist Hungary and her lab equipment at her home | university was likely worse than what a median high school in | the U.S. has at its disposal. (There wasn't much convertible | currency east of the Iron Curtain to buy top stuff, and not | enough capacity to manufacture it locally.) | honkycat wrote: | Sure, there are geniuses that can spawn out of anywhere that | occasionally rise out of bad situations. They are notable | because they are EXCEPTIONS to the rule. | | But there is massive inequality and poverty in the United | States. Here is an example: In my home town, the poverty rate | is 12%-13%. In the US state of Georgia it is 17%. In the | Czech Republic, which has about the same population as | Georgia, it is 10%. | | So your assertion that "her lab equipment at her home | university was likely worse than what a median high school in | the U.S." is questionable. There are plenty of people living | in horrible conditions in the US. Our scores in mathematics | are 30th amongst developed nations. | | Our cities are full-to-the-brim with a homeless population | that we have abandoned to the streets that our cities and | citizens do not have the wealth to address due to all of the | money going to 1% of the population. In fact, our homeless | population is almost to 0.2% of the total population, coming | in at around 500k people. | | Also, the assertion "other people have it worse" is not | useful. I can be critical of our current society and also | realize I have a privilege living where I do. I can see the | impoverished system I grew up in, compare it to the | opportunities afforded other people, and say: "Hmm. Maybe we | can improve society somewhat." | lern_too_spel wrote: | I say good on the parents for putting their resources to good | use. A lot of them squander it away on spoiled kids, waiting | for the kids to show interest in anything useful. Yes, it would | be great for society if all kids have these benefits, but we | will only get there when people understand that this is | something worthwhile. | honkycat wrote: | I agree! No smoke between me and people who are well off! | | Much better use of money than a super-car or many other | options. Not that I have any right to say what people can do | with their money. | citizenpaul wrote: | No he didnt. These type of fake child genius articlea are | harmful. | dekhn wrote: | Does anybody have a link to what the kid actually did? I skimmed | the video, looked at the diagram, read the original MAKE article, | and it seems like the kid did a science project and it doesn't | actually diagnose pneumonia. Am I missing something important? | | The reason I'm asking is that I see a lot of these (used to judge | science fairs, worked with smart undergraduates who build their | own equipment) but most of it overstates the technical advances | made by the kid. | jboy55 wrote: | My guess, 1 He found/was given an off the shelf fungal sensor | designed to detect pneumonia 2 He hooked it up to a raspi 3 He | trained a small tensorflow model to give true/false signals | based on the input | | All in all, not that bad of a little hack. | | What I'm most disappointed by these science fare projects is | that its often found that the parents of the child are top | engineers in the specific field of the projects. In this case, | perhaps his mom is a Sr Engineer at a company producing | artificial noses aimed at detecting pneumonia where she is in | charge of developing dev-kits and SDKs that happen to include | sample tensor flow models. | | What annoys me is that the story is often one of a kid, against | all odds, learning all of this tech out of their own gumption. | Where in the same science fare, there probably was a kid who | had no help from their parents, who hacked together a 'are the | lights on' circuit, using hand-me-down tech components, who's | getting no notice. | worldvoyageur wrote: | Best science fair I ever saw was at a remote construction | site near Qinshan, China in 1999. Many Canadian engineers | lived on a camp by the site, building two nuclear reactors | [1]. The camp also had a school for the engineer's children, | literally one room with a teacher and about twenty children | from grade 1 to grade 8 [2]. It was a good school, the | teacher excellent and the kids clearly loving it. The older | kids got a lot out of helping the younger ones. There was | excellent quality recent school work in evidence on the | walls. Though I did occasionally pop by the school when I'd | visit the site, I usually didn't. | | On one of my site visits I was asked if I wanted a detour | from the project site to check out the school science fair. I | later figured out that the minor scheduling difficulties I | had around that particular visit was so that I'd be there on | the day of the science fair. | | Every student had a project. There were a few of the usual | suspects, like the baking soda volcano and potato battery. | However, those were the exception. Most of the projects were | astounding, well beyond what I'd seen as an engineering | undergrad in university. | | The kids, standing proudly in front of their project and the | bristol board explanations, knew very well how to explain the | project and had a deep understanding of how it had come | together. They'd definitely done the work and were | justifiably proud. | | That said, the majority of the projects were such that they | could only have been the product of many evenings and | weekends over months of father[3]/child working together. | I'll assume that work on the next science fair would have | begun the day after the science fair I saw wrapped up. | | 1. Qinshan III, units 1 and 2; | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinshan_Nuclear_Power_Plant. | | 2. High school was a boarding school back in Canada. | | 3. I'm pretty sure that all the engineers were male, for I'd | be remembering a female engineer, but the school kids were a | balance mix of boys and girls. | lowbloodsugar wrote: | I have friends where the dad works, and the mom runs the | household, but the mom is just as good an engineer (or | better). Since you're acknowledging and explaining the | issue with [3], perhaps just using "parent" would have been | better. | worldvoyageur wrote: | I appreciate the observation. | | While I understand the logic of using parent, as a | general rule I'm uncomfortable deliberately substituting | words with less information when a word with more | information is available. | | It'd be like seeing a flock of geese fly over and saying | birds. If you weren't really sure they were geese, or | thought maybe a few were not geese, then maybe you write | 'birds'. However, if you saw geese and it would have been | striking and obvious if one or more of the birds was not | a goose, then more information is given saying geese | rather than birds. | | If there had been a female engineer at the site, working | or at home, I'm pretty sure I'd have known. This was | rural China in the late 90s. A live in nanny would have | been available at very low cost. Plus, the hunger for | engineers willing to live at a camp site in rural China | for months at a time was such that had there been any | engineer spouses, they'd have had to make a very | deliberate decision NOT to work. | [deleted] | Damogran6 wrote: | We ran into this in Cubscouts with pinewood derby...the | solution we had was a build day where the kids could go from | raw block to finished car with our help and tools (belt | sander with used up belt, parent or leader running the | scrollsaw for the younger kids...paint at the Cubmaster's | house and the parent doesn't have to worry about spraypaint) | | Then to get past the 'parents doing all the building' we ran | an outlaw class where the siblings and parents could | compete...but it's the same kind of dynamic. | | I don't immediately see the issue with the parent helping a | child with tech they're familiar with...helping my son 3d | print and sell fidget spinners had lots of little life | lessons wrapped up in it. | dekhn wrote: | Heh... at "build day" only the son of the person with the | tools was allowed to use any of them. I ended up building a | real clunker and felt terrible for years when it lost every | race to better-engineered systems. I didn't get any real | parental help. | | This time around (by which I mean, my son was in cub scouts | and doing the derby) I helped my son by showing him some | basics of woodworking and how to make something that looked | right and rolled properly, but beyond that it was all him. | He didn't win any races, but wasn't bummed about it at all. | | Following that, I bought a bunch of pine blanks, read a few | papers on how to make faster cars (those nail axles are | REALLY DUMB), bought Fusion 360, designed a car, and flip- | milled it on my personal CNC, over a period of a year (it's | never raced). it amuses me to no end that imposter syndrome | and OCD drove me to be a well-compensated software engineer | with enough free time to build his own pinewood derby | racecar in his own time on his own terms. | Damogran6 wrote: | I was cubmaster for 3 years and felt a little bad that my | two boys didn't get near the attention the other kids | got...til the last year I helped them with weight | distribution, lubrication and axle alignment. The Wife | and I ran in Outlaw and had the family been eligible | would have taken 4 of the top 7 times. (I think the boys | got 2nd and 4th) | | I'm looking at 6 of the cars now, I really should mount | them in a display or something. | | One of the boys is learning chassis fab and welding and | the other is learning Industrial Design...so I guess it | was a good experience. | danachow wrote: | No that's the point - there wasn't evidence that any of 1, 2, | or 3 was ever done. Some mime guy puts together a gas sensor | and tinyml setup - the kid makes some report on the | _hypothetical_ ability to use to diagnose fungal pneumonia in | reference to some papers in the literature, but I don't see | actual evidence of an actual experiment. | samhw wrote: | > there probably was a kid who had no help from their | parents, who hacked together a 'are the lights on' circuit, | using hand-me-down tech components, who's getting no notice. | | I'd have struggled to articulate what annoys me about stories | like this, but this absolutely hits the nail on the head. I | went to a school in the City of London with very elite | investment-banker-parents demographics, and I can't tell you | the number of stories like this. One comes to mind where one | kid won a contest for designing a stockpicking algorithm, and | it turned out - of course - that his mum was a fund manager | at Goldman, specialising in that exact same area. I don't | know what the point of it is. Is there not more to life than | gaming university applications? | TuringNYC wrote: | Dig deeper into some of these stories and you realize they | also knew someone at the newspaper. Or a very expensive | college applications specialist (i.e., $20k+) orchestrated | the entire thing from concept to connections to media | feeding, etc. Throw in a back-story professionally written | and you've got top college acceptances! | | Obviously, also throw in hand-selected medical specialists | who diagnose you and prescribe extra time on the exams, | great photos of your child at the local soup kitchen, a | clutch summer internship with the local congressperson's | office. | | The entire college game is comprehensively stacked against | the poor. Throw in the abandoning of test-based systems | towards "leadership evaluation" acceptance methods and you | get even more invested into gaming this process by the | wealthy. | dekhn wrote: | What bothers me the most is there was another kid who | didn't win, who did real scientific work, and will go on to | be a great scientist, but will never get the attention, | credit, or funding that the first kid did. | samhw wrote: | Precisely. You can definitely see the downstream effects | of this, too, with lots of academics who see great | success by publishing total tripe in well-packaged books | (see: Malcolm Gladwell, the entire field of social | psychology, etc). | Mezzie wrote: | I cannot over-emphasize how utterly demoralizing things | like this are to those children. The kids who are smart | enough to do real work are also smart enough to figure | out that nobody will care. | | I was so discouraged by finding out the other children | who liked web development and coding had outside help, | and I had a really hard time understanding why things | like Synapse could get a PC Mag review, but I'd be | accused of being a liar if I talked about my own | projects, because that's what happens when you're a kid | working without an adult. Without an appropriately | credentialed adult vouching for you, people accuse you of | stealing your work, lying, being an arrogant snob, etc. | | ESPECIALLY if you're self-taught or were taught by adults | society doesn't think much of. It's believable that the | Pages taught Larry to code when he was wee, but obviously | I couldn't have learned anything from my parents since | one was a high school dropout and the other was the son | of a factory worker. How could THEY have known anything? | 908B64B197 wrote: | > Is there not more to life than gaming university | applications? | | No. | | A lot of parents are getting their kids phony medical | diagnostics just so they can get extra time on exams. [0] | | [0] | https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/03/16/fake- | lea... | TuringNYC wrote: | University applications have such a compounding effect on | things the rest of your life that paid-gaming of | university admissions might well be the highest ROI | investment for many wealthy. | drekipus wrote: | > University applications have such a compounding effect | on things the rest of your life | | does it? I'm not in the US, so I wouldn't know. | lowbloodsugar wrote: | But also please be aware that some of them aren't phony. | javajosh wrote: | The MC knows what the crowd wants to see. If there is some | contest, they will make sure the most attractive person wins. | This is what the crowd wants, and the losers have no | reasonable basis to protest and if they do they'll be | (falsely) accused of being poor sports. Most attractive | people don't know what's really happening, and assume their | win is real. | | The thing is, I get it. There's a wholesome excitement around | the idea of discovery and you want to do your part and not be | a wet blanket. And it's a white lie that is good for society | - if not for the ego of the hero. You want there to be a new | discovery, that came out of nowhere, because that's the | better story. It's the kind of Myth that a good society runs | on, and needs, even if it's false, because the real out-of- | nowhere discovery stories happen too infrequently to be of | use. | | The best thing to do, really, is to give the kid a medal, and | shut up about it not being real, and hope to high heaven he | isn't misled by the easy victory. | samhw wrote: | "Attractive"? Do you mean this in some kind of figurative | sense? If not, then I'm really not at all sure that that's | how science fairs are decided. | javajosh wrote: | samhw wrote: | I'm afraid I don't follow you | [deleted] | pdepip wrote: | Does anyone have any recommended reading or resources for someone | interested in getting involved in similar work? | beeforpork wrote: | > No door is ever closed. You can do anything! I am a thirteen- | year-old kid, and I can do this--if I can do it, anyone can! | | If only a goal of education was to get kids to feel like this! Of | course, not everyone is equally bright, but without the above | attitude, they will not even try, not even try to be interested, | because they think they are too dumb, which is a tragedy. | mwcampbell wrote: | > No door is ever closed. You can do anything! | | This is obvious nonsense. Limitations are real, and I think it's | better to be honest about them. | | Edit: I was wrong to post this shallow dismissal; see below. | maybelsyrup wrote: | Damn, the courage it must've taken to scold a child on a | internet website -- how did you summon it? Do you have a | patreon I can donate to | mwcampbell wrote: | Fair point. It would have been better for me to keep silent | and just let the thought pass. | maybelsyrup wrote: | Now that's real courage. Sincere salute to owning your | shit! | pcmoney wrote: | I agree but there is a self fulfilling aspect to thinking that | way. | | It is better to believe anything is possible and be wrong than | to impose limitations on ourselves. | | Most great accomplishments seem impossible at first. | throwawaymanbot wrote: | the-dude wrote: | I wonder what his parents do for a living. Just curious. | SubiculumCode wrote: | In 9th grade I took first in a Science State championship | competition. I didn't just win, I blew the competition away, | and it changed how people approached the competition for the | next 20 years. My device was ugly, large, obtuse, poor. People | laughed at it. The favorite in the competition was this slick | device that rumor had it was designed and manufactured by their | father's engineering company. Everyone laughed, that is, until | my ugly device performed like a Lambo in comparison to their | Ford Pinto. | | My father? A smart, but not affluent, guy who thought hard on | things. He's the one that actually invented the device...but I | learned a few things along the way. | | Parents absolutely help children become high achievers, but it | doesn't always mean it was attached to their day job. Having | attentive parents is a privilege. | | note: As for the device, it was just a little car powered by a | weight. | csdvrx wrote: | Does it matter? Watching everything through the myopic lens of | "privilege" is wrong. | | A kid can have an idea and parents can help. For now, the set | of {kids, parents} that can do that is limited. But technology | changes and becomes more accessible. What matters is the new | things that become not just possible but easy and cheap. | | For a previously "costly" problem that in 2012 would involve a | 5 MP digital pictures + geotagging + OCR then sending the raws | for GPU processing, any random smartphone from 2022 will do. | | In 2012 you could have screamed "privilege!". Not in 2022. | | As a kid, I'd have loved to try to hack together a app that | recognizes mushrooms (or flowers, or fruits which I all found | so super interesting, especially bugs and OMG they fly if I | blew on them!!) | | It would have been hard. I would have benefited from some help. | But I would have had a lot of fun, after which I would have | used the app to fill in the name for my leaf-book collection | effort (I wanted to have a specimen of EVERYTHING from the | garden, then from the street, then...) | | I only had books and some websites and a bad camera. So I drew | :) A kid now could have picture search engines like yandex to | do better with a much better camera too (MACRO MODE!) and some | generic photo processing software. A rich kid then could have | had something similar, with an expansive Nikon camera, and | photoshop (crop, filter...) and maybe some parental connections | to biologists and botanists. | | Is it privilege if they did? Yes. And it's wonderful because | every kid has this privilege now! And they can have more fun! | gedy wrote: | I didn't take OP as a commentary on privilege, more if the | parents were already working in this field/area, vs the "boy | genius" narrative | kartben_ wrote: | spoiler alert: none of them work in this field/area. | the-dude wrote: | Thank you. | cinntaile wrote: | It does when the title says "13yo kid builds e-nose". It's | not about privilege, it's about being honest. Maybe the title | is honest and the kid is just very bright, that's cool too! | csdvrx wrote: | Yet most people seem to be jumping to the conclusion, | making assumptions, and letting their views taint their | judgment, without even knowing all the facts (see a comment | below asking if the parents were already working in the | field) | orf wrote: | You wrote a 300 word response full of jumped-to | conclusions, assumptions etc to someone just asking what | his parents did. | csdvrx wrote: | Read the other comments and see the implications from | that seemingly innocent question. | honkycat wrote: | > Does it matter? Watching everything through the myopic lens | of "privilege" is wrong. | | May I ask why? | | You see it all the time, unironically: "How a 23 year old | couple bought their dream home!" and it ends up in the | article their parents literally paid for it. | | Or Bill Gates. There is the classic: "How to become as rich | as Bill Gates: Choose your grandparents carefully." | | I see it elsewhere in this thread: "Ugh. And MY 13 year old | just wants to play video games!" And that is unfair to | themselves, and unfair to their kids. | | You see it everywhere. So many musicians, artists, writers, | PEOPLE succeed in part because they just don't need to make | money. Because they already have it. | | And then they act like it was all done themselves and while | they are not bad people for having money, and they are | sincerely talented, that isn't the whole story. The whole | story is that they didn't ever really even need to succeed to | live a comfortable life, and that is a HUGE advantage over | other people. | | --------- | | Allow me to tie this to my own experience: | | First, I want to acknowledge that I am extremely privileged | in my own ways. I grew up in a wonderful home with a great | family. We were educated, and kind, and loved reading and | were encouraging. The rural place I grew up in wasn't a fancy | high-tech metropolis, but I did not experience any violence | in my community which counts for a lot. | | I went to a private university on a big scholarship. It was | cheaper than any state school I could have gone to. My first | two years where I was in the dorms and was paying with | student loans, I was very active in the student volunteer | community, and the computer science club. | | But once I left the dorms, that was IT. I needed to 100% | support myself, rent/food/etc. I spent my days working manual | QA for a software company, 40/hr week, while attending school | at night. | | And my life changed. I didn't make any new friends and lost | the ones I had. I was never around for the "college stuff." | Every waking moment became toil, either through work or | through school. | | While my peers were doing research studies for natural | language processing, or participating in CS contests, or | building relationships, or falling in love, or actually doing | well on homework and tests, or any number of productive | things, I was plugging 3g WIFI dongles into and out of | laptops for $15/hr. I was running test cases for 8 hours a | day, then going to class from 6-9, then doing homework until | I went to sleep, then getting up in the morning and doing it | again. | | And the deficit I had in my education followed me for a LONG | time. Still follows me today. | | So yes, I do think we should interrogate situation people | were in when they achieved something. Because sometimes | people don't really achieve anything other than spending | their parent's money. | | And there are circumstances where something that seems like a | big achievement was really just an inevitability. | colechristensen wrote: | Pause a second and look at what you wrote and what you're | responding to. You're arguing very passionately against a | straw man, nobody mentioned privilege until you did. | csdvrx wrote: | the-dude wrote: | I was just curious and very aware of the possible | blowback. I even doubted for a while to delete the | comment ( no shallow dismissals ). | | But it isn't and it is a question that comes along with | the subject of 13yo geniuses. | | I was curious and now I have an answer ( not from you ). | | edit: In a broader, more contemporary frame : It is now | we need to be ever more critical of news we get served | and rejecting that under the guise of 'think of the | children' is just lame. | [deleted] | cruano wrote: | > A kid can have an idea and parents can help. | | Or... the other way around | technicolorwhat wrote: | Pretty awesome project really! As a sidenote: A bunch of the ML | training and edge deployment magic is done via | https://edgeimpulse.com which seems to make it much more | accessible to build such a thing. | mywittyname wrote: | I remember having an assignment like this my second year of | college. It was basically an array of various smoke detector | sensors wired up to a parallel port. With diverse enough sensors, | you could stick a cup into a box with a fan and the sensor, and | be able to tell if the cup had OJ, coke, or coffee in it using | basic PCA. | | Given the tools available now, I'm not surprised a smart 13yo | could build something like this. Especially if the sensor itself | is an off-the-shelf component with device drivers and such | already available for it. | Herodotus38 wrote: | I wish I could read the paper. I'm interested in what kind of | fungal pneumonia they were looking at. My googling got me to find | the title on the Middle School Facebook page but not sure if it's | available ti read. | kartben_ wrote: | I'll check with Caleb but I am guessing/hoping he will be | willing to make the paper more broadly accessible soon. | Herodotus38 wrote: | Thanks, for reference I am a hospital physician (internal | medicine) so I do occasionally deal with fungal pneumonia. | thatcat wrote: | I doubt that it is possible to differentiate between fungal | types using gas sensors trained on spores being released. | Herodotus38 wrote: | I would be interested in what they are testing, it probably | wouldn't be spores but likely something along the lines of | biochemical compounds specific to certain species. For | example we use blood tests for the presence of | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactomannan to help | diagnose invasive aspergillosis. | causi wrote: | Is the headline being a straight-up lie a valid reason for | flagging? The kid did not diagnose pneumonia. He came up with an | idea for a design that might hypothetically detect pneumonia. | periheli0n wrote: | 100% agree. Great achievement by the 13 year old but | insinuating that this device can detect pneumonia is utterly | misleading. | donio wrote: | Unfortunately there is no other way to signal trash | submissions. "Not upvoting" is not really a sufficient signal | when enough people get baited by the headline. | Brajeshwar wrote: | Cool. And, I have a 13-year and she is still, literally, crying | over spilt milk, hacked Roblox merchandize, how done the steak | is, why her monitor is tilted wrong, and why I din't warned her | before rebooting the primary router. | russellbeattie wrote: | My son, now a sophomore at UCSC, definitely gave me a few | moments of "Uhh... I really hope my kid isn't an idiot" at that | age. Living in Silicon Valley, he had friends creating crazy | Gary's Mod levels using Python (this was a decade ago) that | they collaborated on using GitHub. I was shocked at how | sophisticated junior high coders could get! My son, however, is | not a techie and like his father, has always been a little | immature for his age. I was like, "Why is my kid the only one | who isn't a genius!?!" | | It all turned out well and now he's happily studying economics | (yeah, my apple didn't land anywhere near the tree). Everyone | matures at their own pace, and computers, as I'm sure all of us | know from our own history as geeks, are easy to impress people | with. If you're really into biology, animals, astronomy, etc. | what can you show people to wow them? Not much that hasn't been | seen before. But any 13 yo can download and learn how to use | the latest professional CAD software, the same IDEs pros use to | make AAA games, or the same backend AI services used by major | companies. And they are encouraged to do so! I can't imagine | there's a lot of "Learn CRISPR at home!" tutorials out there. | That makes a big difference. | efdee wrote: | You rebooted the router? Without prior warning? | | That's the 2020 equivalent of your parents picking up the phone | while you're online on dialup. | fortran77 wrote: | My 13-year-old cat can probably sniff out pneumonia. If only he | could talk and tell us what he's smelling. | nickkell wrote: | All the signs were there. If only we had eyes to see them! | honkycat wrote: | She's a child. I'm sure this kid has his moments as well. | | Harboring resentment for your teenager for being moody is like | the frog and the scorpion. it is in their nature! | | Not to say isn't maddening, mind you. | NavinF wrote: | > why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router | | I'm with her on this one. Not announcing the outage before it | happens is kinda disrespectful. | didip wrote: | Did you send a downtime notification to her and update your | family's status page? | Brajeshwar wrote: | Yes, I did but I forgot to send her notification on our | Discord channel too. | martneumann wrote: | "Daaad, are you complaining about me on the Internet again?!" | ;) | mschuster91 wrote: | > and why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary | router. | | Basic sysops rule: either create redundancy (which is hard to | do in a consumer space outside of Mac Pro machines as 99.99% of | laptops carry only a single LAN port and in towers, about 3/4) | or warn your users before doing maintenance. | Brajeshwar wrote: | Well, I do have backups. This is India, so I even have a | backup for the backup. I have three ISPs load-balanced, and | not experienced any downtime since the beginning of the | Pandemic (early 2020). I do realize them going down but we | never realize until I looked them up. | | It runs almost all the time, but sometimes I need to update | settings, etc. which needs reboots the load balancer that | distributes everything from. | | :-) | blitzar wrote: | And you cant do this durring a) the school day when the | primary end user is not home or b) wake up at 2am and | reboot it while the primary end user is asleep? | | Honestly, I think your kid should break out the SLA and | check what compensation they get paid for prime time | outages. | Brajeshwar wrote: | Yes, lesson learnt and we have agreed to the new | agreement -- no more primetime outages -- planned or | otherwise. | dkersten wrote: | I mean, another solution is to give warning at regular | intervals beforehand (day, hour, ten minutes, 1 minute | perhaps). Basically planned outages with ample warning. | Of course, avoiding prime time planned outages is always | good in any scenario and I'm sure goes a long way to keep | all clients happy. | | With that said, I doubt your 13 year old daughter client | is actually paying for that level of service, so... ;-) | blitzar wrote: | I believe the SLA for a 13 year old is 110% uptime, with | consequences being _The end of the world_. | | I am not a lawyer so feel free to go to court claiming | that 100% uptime is the limits of mathematics or that the | world will not end if <insert social media platform of | choice> is not accessible for 5 minutes on a tuesday | afternoon. Its a losing case every time, best just to | settle up the case quietly with an extra scoop of | icecream or some robux and cut your losses. | scrollaway wrote: | > _why I din 't warned her before rebooting the primary | router._ | | I'd be pissed too. You don't mess with the router without | warning people using it ;) | nexuist wrote: | Wonder where she got that from? | amelius wrote: | The main invention is in the electronic nose. The kid just did | the plumbing of connecting it to some ML library. | | Of course, the electronic nose itself is a work of plumbing too, | where some existing gas sensors are put on a pcb. | | In short, nothing seems really new here, but the application is | interesting. I guess it's always interesting when people start | looking for correlations in data and get some positive results, | so from that point of view it is noteworthy. | hwillis wrote: | The sensor (the four gas sensors on the board) was created by a | third person. | | The artificial nose is the TinyML model which trains on the | sensor data (CO, NO2, ethanol, VOCs) to detect arbitrary scents | by their signatures in those four categories. | | The fungal pneumonia detector wires up a whole API with azure | etc. and trains the model specifically to recognize pneumonia, | based on an actual science experiment which grew and measured | the fungus in artificial lungs. | | As far as I'm concerned, both Caleb and Benjamin had brilliant | ideas, executed them fantastically, and created something that | may be truly useful. A $40 sensor that can detect disease just | by breathing on it is more of a tangible contribution to | humanity than many software engineers make in their life and | almost certainly more than 99% of us did before the age of 14. | amelius wrote: | The reason why no engineer has made this yet, is because the | medical data was not available to them. | | The innovation is in the data, not in the ML. | hwillis wrote: | You are wrong. The kid GREW FUNGUS IN ARTIFICIAL LUNGS | using a sterile field made out of a plastic bin with dish | gloves cut into it. He didn't need medical data. Anyone | could have done this- anyone with the intelligence and | creativity that this kid has. | dekhn wrote: | is it possible you're overstating what the kid did a bit | here? The history of sterile fields shows that even great | scientists take decades to debug contamination that | causes false positives and negatives. ASn experiment like | this can be easily thrown off by any number of variables | that weren't carefully controlled for. | amelius wrote: | You need medical data if you want to validate your | results for a real medical disorder. | | Fabrication of data is not very useful if you have to | gather data for validation anyway. | pmarreck wrote: | > The innovation is in the data, not in the ML. | | can't you kind of say this about all ML? That the main | driver in ML is 99% the quality of the training data and 1% | the specific details of the neural networks used? | amelius wrote: | For most real-world applications of ML, yes. Of course, | what happens in ML-research is different (where e.g. new | networks for new modalities are invented). | | But back to the topic, I bet the kid didn't even invent | their own neural network topology, but just pulled a | predefined network from a library, perhaps without even | knowing it. Which is ok, because that is how most people | use ML. | wesleywt wrote: | It is great that the kid is involved and interested in these | technologies. Whether it works is another issue. You are | going to need metrics such a LODs, LOQs, sensitivity and | specificity to determine if this beats the gold standard | tests. | deckar01 wrote: | No, the author designed the ML training project also. The last | section of the Make article is how to send the data to Edge | Impulse and configure the ML training [0]. | | Mentioning Microsoft Azure IoT Central in the article and the | video is odd, because you definitely don't need that to | complete this project. It seems to be a feature that the | Microsoft employee added to the GitHub project their self [1]. | | Caleb mentioned in the video that a co-worker of his aunt | authored the research paper about detecting bacterial pneumonia | from VOC levels. Everything else feels like a Microsoft | marketing hype train that went off the rails. | | [0]: https://makezine.com/projects/second-sense-build-an-ai- | smart... | | [1]: https://github.com/kartben/artificial- | nose/blob/master/firmw... | kartben_ wrote: | With this reasoning, aren't most things a work of plumbing, and | nothing ever really new? And isn't it how innovation happens, | at the end of the day? | tinc293 wrote: | Well, first of all, you can see those glove holes are too | small, that's not the hands of a 13-year-old who mines his | own silica. Disgraceful. | dkersten wrote: | I think the news is less _" 13 year old revolutionized | medicine"_ and more _" 13 year old used ingenuity to create | cool thing"_. Or at least, that's how I think it should be | read. Focusing too much on the end result is likely not the | best outcome because, while its a working prototype, many | interesting prototypes never make it to fully end user capable | system and there are a lot of hurdles to overcome to get it | there. | | But that doesn't take away from the fact that its a cool | project and the kid did a great job in coming up with it and | executing on it! Its definitely far beyond what most people | achieve, nevermind 13 year olds. | SubiculumCode wrote: | This is a story about inspiration and achievement. Objective | facts are less important than the message, IMO, especially | after decades of "try-hard" being ridiculed in the U.S. | foolinaround wrote: | we need to identify the factors that enabled this awesome kid to | have the background knowledge, tools, environment etc and see how | we can replicate them to find other such diamonds in the wild... | rebelde wrote: | I highly suspect that his parents "have the background | knowledge, tools, environment etc". | blueatlas wrote: | To what end? Our world is not short of this kind of talent, at | any age. Those that have these abilities will get there, in | time. So maybe it would be better at that age to teach them to | paint, throw a baseball, fly fish, travel, etc. | foolinaround wrote: | Why should they be taught to paint or to throw a baseball but | not to use a tool (like a program, etc) | | I was merely saying that the knowledge and facilities to | paint, to play baseball or program should be accessible, and | kids must be exposed to the fact that they exist... then, the | kids pick per their inclination? | em-bee wrote: | knowledge does not motivate people to do great things. | | what children need to learn first and foremost is to be | good people, create the desire to help others and | contribute to society. | | once they have that, they drive themselves to learn what | they need in order to achieve that. | | this kid here had the drive to solve a problem because they | had experienced it themselves. it doesn't matter how they | solved it and how much help they got, what matters is what | drove them to solve the problem in the first place. | | if we can create that drive then any of the above, whether | it is art, sports or programming will happen based on the | kids motivation. | Ataraxiaist wrote: | We seem to have a strange anti-intellectual bias in our culture | when it comes to children. | | I mean I was not pushed hard as a kid to play guitar or play | football/wrestling but I was pushed. It took quite a bit of | time before I really fell in love with playing guitar. It is | hard to fall in love with something when you suck at it. I | needed to be pushed. Sports were fun at the time but we | completely overstate the value of organized sports IMO. | | I don't know why we see playing a musical instrument as | something different than learning scientific instruments. We | expect the kid to just naturally be driven in science from day | one and pushing them is seen as something morally off. | | It reminds me of the crazy hockey parent that pushes their kid | way too hard in hockey. While some kids might end up hating | hockey, a huge % just end up being really good hockey players | compared to the average person. People tend to fall in love | with things they are good at. | | I am childfree but if I did have a kid I would be a science | version of the hockey parent and let the chips fall as they | may. The risk/reward is just massive for the kid. | croes wrote: | >No door is ever closed. You can do anything! I am a thirteen- | year-old kid, and I can do this--if I can do it, anyone can! | | For some, doors are not only closed, but they are also slammed in | their faces with full force | bb123 wrote: | Does anyone else approach these "teen invents x" or "wiz kid | middle schooler discovers y" articles with extreme skepticism? | About half the time the invention turns out to be bogus or | trivial, and in the other half it comes to light the parents were | behind it. | skocznymroczny wrote: | Yes, seems like people really want to believe stories of | teenagers suddenly making breakthrough discoveries. In this | case it's probably having some sensors with data, throwing them | into a neural network and getting good results on a training | set. The question is, does it work at all on real world data... | munificent wrote: | I think the important part is to understand that the primary | goal here is not to advance science. We have lots of adult | scientists with better education, time, equipment doing that. | | It's to improve the pipeline of kids excited to go into science | by making science accessible, rewarding, and prestigious. | ssewell wrote: | I, for one, am one of those people. However, after watching a | few minutes of the linked video, I'm convinced (and pleasantly | surprised) that Caleb has firm grasp on his design, and | honestly sounds like he was the driving force behind his own | particular implementation. | kartben_ wrote: | This. Thanks for taking the time to watch the video to form | your own opinion! | rocgf wrote: | Yes, always, since it's exaggerated more often than not. | [deleted] | oh_sigh wrote: | Yup. There's very little drawback to just disregarding any | article which highlights a person's youth and their amazing | accomplishments. Same reason to avoid "30 under 30" type | articles as well. You're playing the game those people want you | to play by ingesting those articles, and I see no need to | engage myself in other people's "grinding". | wjp3 wrote: | I'm immediately reminded of the science fair projects in | elementary school where it was clearly obvious that the parent | did all of the work. | 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: | I agree, these clickbait articles are rarely honest and most of | them reek of parents trying to turn their children into | (internet) celebreties. | | Also I noticed that they typically employ a very common pattern | in which the headline makes a truly big claim (e.g. "10 year | old invents cheap way to purify any water source"), then | afterwards it turns out that this claim is far from accurate | (e.g. the child did not invent it himself, had massive help and | while the solution technically works it is in not feasible at | all in the way the headline suggests). | | Once it is noticed that the claim is false in the way it is | presented the article then gets defended by pointing out that a | child that young coming into contact with such a project is | still impressive, which is again technically true but | ultimately comes off as a dishonest deflection. | MisterBastahrd wrote: | The international science fair is a good example. I grew up | with a couple of people who would participate every year, and | every year it was obvious from their academics and being in the | same classrooms and social circles as them that they didn't | come up with this stuff. Their projects were gigantic, expertly | researched, and featured technology that no high school student | in the pre-internet age would have been able to source or use | independently. One of them had a single mother with a PhD in | the field, the other had a science teacher mother and a father | with an MS in biomedical engineering... in the same field. | ajsnigrutin wrote: | > turns out to be bogus | | Sometimes very bogus, even totally fake | | example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otjvUz7qKXc ('free | energy' device, "invented" by a kid, debunked by electroboom) | cmaneu wrote: | Did you watch the video linked in the article? | [deleted] | wesleywt wrote: | Specific, sensitivity, limits of detection and limits of | quantitation is more important than a video. | kartben_ wrote: | Interestingly, those are all very good points, all of | which are being covered ...in the video. | thatcat wrote: | I mean this is a cool application, but not original idea. | Gas/particulate sensors are used in ag to detect fungal spore | concentration zones for spot treatment by looking for a | specific particle size using the laser in the sensor. The worst | part about these type articles is that they don't even cover | the design usually so you can't tell if it's a novel idea or | not. This one features hand drawn diagram with some incubator | system, I guess it's for training purposes but idk. Mostly it | seems like this is an advertorial for Microsoft AI. | hwillis wrote: | If you watch the video it's very apparent that the kid deeply | knows how everything works. If he did not make this entire | (very impressive) project himself, he certainly could have. He | understands how chemicals interact with the various gas sensors | (used limonene, pine and seed oils as test substances), how the | model works, how to grow fungus in a sterile environment to get | training data, how to get an API together to service the | device... | colechristensen wrote: | Yeah it's usually "adult who knows how to do a thing presents | kid with all of the pieces and guidance to make it happen". | Which is great, you should do that for kids, but the articles | about it usually make one cringe. | ravenstine wrote: | Hmmm... I'm skeptical. Not necessarily because I don't think that | pneumonia could be detected by testing VOCs in breath, but | because I'm currently working on a project that uses sensors to | do breath analysis and my amateur research has informed me that | it's fairly hard to get right (which is why my primary goal is to | identify deltas rather than achieve numerical accuracy). | | For one, VOCs can be present in breath for other reasons besides | some sort of infection in the lung, and VOCs are incredibly hard | to differentiate with just a sensor. The fact that they tend to | be faint in human breath even at their highest (in contrast to O2 | and CO2) doesn't help. Even the most expensive PID sensors for | VOCs (they get up into the several hundreds a pop) can't really | tell you whether the predominant gas is acetone or alcohol or | acetaldehyde or hydrogen sulfide. So you've got to figure out | whether the presence of VOCs is truly an anomaly and not just a | part of ketosis. In which case you will also need to measure _at | least_ VeO2 to see whether the VOCs correspond with the | Respiratory Quotient. | | The "e-nose" project, as described on the MakeZine article, | doesn't appear to do that. It _does_ have an alcohol sensor. But | these sensors aren 't particularly sophisticated. They use | semiconductors with heating elements to detect the presence of | gases, and there is almost certainly some overlap between the | alcohol and VOCs sensors. | | If VOCs are produced by pneumonia, then yes, it's conceivable | that even just the VOCs sensor alone would detect this. But can | this group of sensors used in the e-nose differentiate pneumonia | from catabolism? | | Maybe? -\\_(tsu)_/- | | After all, this thing uses _AI_. And _maybe_ AI can recognize | something that a human can 't by simply looking at a line graph. | _I dunno..._ Such things should be tested against known inputs | before being suggested to diagnose anything. | somebodynew wrote: | It looks like the principle is that a machine learning model | trained on the combined output of four different kinds of gas | sensors can discover correlations between unintentional | characteristics of the sensors. For example, the manufacturer | of an ethanol or nitrogen dioxide sensor is not going to | specify anything about how it responds to vanillin, but it | seems plausible to me that the relationship between their | responses contains some hidden information that could help to | discriminate between vanillin and eugenol. With enough | different sensors, there's quite a bit of information to be | found in mining their undefined behavior. | | That is to say, you can treat the sensor reading as being | completely meaningless and skip interpreting it as indicating | VOC levels. You're just using the sensors as black boxes that | produce arbitrary values with the property that exposure to | organic vapor changes the output "somehow", and letting model | training find some meaning in it. | xvector wrote: | Does this mean that each sensor cluster has to be trained | independently? | joshvm wrote: | Most high-accuracy systems incorporate an onboard | calibration target of some kind. Could be a gas cell | (either sealed or consumable) or a special lamp etc. Or you | buy an instrument that comes with calibration coefficients | from the manufacturer. For example if you sell | spectrometers, you put in the grating and manually adjust | it for the desired range. This is the case for cheaper | instruments (eg Ocean Optics) as well as expensive bespoke | systems which are all hand built. Even if the grating and | mirror mounts are fixed, the tolerance in manufacturing is | rarely good enough that calibration isn't required. It's | way cheaper to do some relatively low accuracy machining | and then just epoxy all the screws down. | | In this case you'd probably calibrate each sensor to a | standard chemical sample and then use the calibration | output. You could train on that, not the raw samples and | then you have a model that works on all devices. | somebodynew wrote: | When this technique is performing at its best, I would | expect so. The old story of the evolved FPGA comes to mind: | https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ | | You're intentionally depending on the "personality" of each | gas sensor to get data measuring unknown features, so you | can't expect consistency from sample to sample. Anything | that was completely portable between different sensors | would inherently be less powerful. | jkaptur wrote: | > With enough different sensors, there's quite a bit of | information to be found in mining their undefined behavior. | | It sounds like you would need to be _exceptionally_ careful | that your meta-process didn 't "find" some signal in pure | noise (via re-using test sets and so on). | mdeck_ wrote: | > It sounds like you would need to be exceptionally careful | that your meta-process didn't "find" some signal in pure | noise (via re-using test sets and so on). | | It sounds like you're actually talking about ordinary | levels of carefulness in this (ML) context. | jkaptur wrote: | That would be great. I'm no ML expert, but my impression | was that standards varied widely from team to team. | DoreenMichele wrote: | He was specifically looking to identify _fungal pneumonia_ not | just any old kind of pneumonia. | | The linked Wikipedia article indicates mortality in | immunocompromised patients can be as high as 90 percent. That | sentence fits with my general impression that fungal pneumonia | is both real serious shit and also typically found in people | with advanced cases of other serious medical problems, like | AIDS or cystic fibrosis. | | It sounds reasonably plausible to me that it's feasible to | detect fungal pneumonia in specific this way with some | reasonable confidence level. | jboy55 wrote: | Well one thing is the teen in question probably has little to | no exposure to a cohort of humans who have fungal pneumonia to | test this on. | trulyme wrote: | This is what I was wondering too. To train a model you need | lots of data. How do you get it for such a project? | mrtnmcc wrote: | In my experience, "AI can extract more information from | sensors" is mostly a myth. | | An example is the SCIO sensor ( | https://nocamels.com/2019/03/scio-kickstarter-darling-promis... | ) which was a cheap handheld spectrometer that claimed to | accurately determine the nutritional information of any food | you pointed it at. | | One good way to debunk this is to measure raw sensor output and | compute Mutual Information (which incorporates sensor | noise/variability). If the sensor only produces X bits of | information, no algorithm will be able to extract more classes | than that. In the SCIO case it was just under 8 bits total of | information. So something like a poor color sensor. You could | train on apples and oranges and maybe do an investor demo, but | it's not actually going to do anything useful (as the | Kickstarter crowd soon learned). | periheli0n wrote: | True, but there _are_ things where AI can help. For example, | in the domain of electronic gas sensors, AI can be used to | disentangle confounding variables like gas, humidity and | temperature. All three affect the sensor output in a | nonlinear fashion, and an ANN can learn the transfer function | that extracts the (almost) pure gas response. | mrtnmcc wrote: | Yes combining relatively independent sensors will increase | the MI. | periheli0n wrote: | The sensors are _not_ independent. | | Gas sensing is really tricky. Metal oxide gas sensors | respond nonlinearly to all three of gas, temperature, and | humidity. Plus they drift. AI can help with the nonlinear | response. Drift hasn't been solved yet, as far as I know. | throwaways85989 wrote: | AI can detect more information in the whole dataset, because | it for example has the whole "breath in- breath out" cycle in | view. Fungi residing in the mouth would be present as | background noise even during breathing in and out. But fungi- | products existing at the end of a breath out cycle, are most | likely to originate from the lungs, due to the mouth | contamination being "flushed" out by the breath itself. | servytor wrote: | https://www.wired.com/2010/02/ff-algorithm/ | mrtnmcc wrote: | Priors can make sensor information more useful maybe, but | that is just knowledge that helps first limit possibilities | before taking a measurement. Priors also work against you | when you are trying to sense something novel that might | indicate a thing you don't expect. | | An aside on sparsity priors (which that article uses).. | reality is actually a lot less sparse than the researcher | models would have you believe. If most dimensions are not | truly zero (e.g., have some small noise present) these | sparsity methods fall apart. That's why you (never?) see | the methods deployed in actual products. | | Specifically, the support determination step usually breaks | down in epsilon sparse and you also get "noise folding". | [deleted] | londons_explore wrote: | AI can extract information from a sensor that is 'obvious' | when you look at it by eye, yet no easy combination of | frequency filters and a carefully tuned threshold can extract | reliably. | westurner wrote: | Is the limit: A) sensor resolution, B) NN architecture and/or | algorithm, C) training sample size, D) training data | (labeling, segmentation) quality, or E) it doesn't | sufficiently predict the variance with low enough error? | | New NN models _are_ able to do more with the exact same | sensor data. | _hl_ wrote: | You cannot conjure information out of thin air. Even with | infinite data and a hypothetical wormhole CPU that runs | everything in O(1) and solves the halting problem, you | still couldn't do this. So to answer your question, the | reason is effectively (A). Sensor resolution might be the | wrong term but it's the general idea. | westurner wrote: | How much information content is there in DNA (and RNA,)? | How do creatures _know or learn_ what not to eat given | limited available sensor data? | _hl_ wrote: | Because they receive additional information from the | environment through highly sensitive sensors producing | massive amounts of information. Whereas the information | you get from a cheap sensor effectively discretizes to a | few bits. | dtech wrote: | You can, but it's called making stuff up | chokma wrote: | I have a mid-price gadget for measuring inside air quality - it | detects VOC and formaldehyde, along with PM2.5 / PM 10. | | It also detects alcohol from drinking a couple of beers as a | dangerous increase in formaldehyde... | Fordec wrote: | From working on the environmental sensor side of things, I'd | concur. The VOCs will be able to be picked up, but the cross | talk will be huge across _other_ VOCs that don 't themselves | indicate pneumonia. There isn't one VOC, there's thousands. | False positives are written all over this. This is the very | same approach Theranos went. On a science level, sure, | technically possible maybe. You'll even get boolean outputs. | But on an engineering and regulatory level, you're in for a | world of pain without the spectral tech that is still 2-5 years | away before this is worth basing human lives on. | daenz wrote: | Great on Caleb for this accomplishment! | | >No door is ever closed. You can do anything! I am a thirteen- | year-old kid, and I can do this--if I can do it, anyone can! | | Although he may have similar opportunities to his peers, he | (understandably) doesn't yet realize that he has a "spark" that | not everyone is fortunate enough to cultivate. Age is not | strictly the limiting factor to being capable of reaching a high | potential. | zht wrote: | not to mention a stable home life and parents who have the | ability/time/resources to provide a kid an environment to be | curious about this stuff | 99_00 wrote: | I had no idea there was an e-nose project out there. Is e-nose a | field with active research or is it something that's seen as | being just too hard/cross disciplinary? | | I see robust e-nose as being a huge development that would change | how we see the world. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-17 23:00 UTC)