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from the I-heard-what-you-were-thinking-of-saying dept.
Team IDs Spoken Words and Phrases in Real Time from Brain's Speech Signals
UC San Francisco scientists recently showed that brain activity recorded as research participants spoke could be used to create remarkably realistic synthetic versions of that speech, suggesting hope that one day such brain recordings could be used to restore voices to people who have lost the ability to speak. However, it took the researchers weeks or months to translate brain activity into speech, a far cry from the instant results that would be needed for such a technology to be clinically useful. Now, in a complementary new study, again working with volunteer study subjects, the scientists have for the first time decoded spoken words and phrases in real time from the brain signals that control speech, aided by a novel approach that involves identifying the context in which participants were speaking.
[...] In the new study, published July 30 in Nature Communications [DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-10994-4], researchers from the Chang lab led by postdoctoral researcher David Moses, PhD, worked with three such research volunteers to develop a way to instantly identify the volunteers' spoken responses to a set of standard questions based solely on their brain activity, representing a first for the field.
To achieve this result, Moses and colleagues developed a set of machine learning algorithms equipped with refined phonological speech models, which were capable of learning to decode specific speech sounds from participants' brain activity. Brain data was recorded while volunteers listened to a set of nine simple questions (e.g. "How is your room currently?", "From 0 to 10, how comfortable are you?", or "When do you want me to check back on you?") and responded out loud with one of 24 answer choices. After some training, the machine learning algorithms learned to detect when participants were hearing a new question or beginning to respond, and to identify which of the two dozen standard responses the participant was giving with up to 61 percent accuracy as soon as they had finished speaking.
[...] Moses's new study was funded by through a multi-institution sponsored academic research agreement with Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), a research division within Facebook focused on developing augmented- and virtual-reality technologies. As FRL has described, the goal for their collaboration with the Chang lab, called Project Steno, is to assess the feasibility of developing a non-invasive, wearable BCI device that could allow people to type by imagining themselves talking.
See also: Facebook gets closer to letting you type with your mind
Brain-computer interfaces are developing faster than the policy debate around them
Previously: Brain Implant Translates Thoughts Into Synthesized Speech
(Score: 2, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:43PM (1 child)
This is a fair question, I overstated and I am over-generalizing.
'the purpose of college' is not singularly to discourage or prevent the political thought of intellectuals.
In my experience I encountered undercover repression on campus and found it difficult to learn about anything else in my coursework but technical subjects, and was discouraged every time I had an interest in anything else.
The way they filter people out who are not going to eventually be able to do kindof monstrous things without asking questions is passive and not overt, it's important to present a university as a place of freedom for the brochures.
In my engineering capstone class we had a day of ethics where we watched a video where an engineer was monitoring how much of some totally cancerous poison they were dumping in a river and he found the numbers were way to high and he had to decide what he would do.
I asked a question like, isn't it entirely stupid to be poisoning the river at all, that's water that we drink you know.
And at that point everyone kindof knew I was the sort of hippy who would ask this question but mine was the only question asked in a class of 20 or so. I would think every waste is a resource in disguise how can we use this extra poisonous chemical somewhere else? etc but that is just outright heresy.
For instance.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:02PM
That engineer ... should probably take an ethics course [youtube.com]. Engineers are kind of special in that they integrate natural laws (and ethical concerns) from multiple disciplines and produce real-world results, not just research papers. A single day and a handful of case studies isn't going to do it.