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A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

blog.benjamin-cabe.com

131–140 of 188 posts

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#132
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 respo…

Does this mean that each sensor cluster has to be trained independently?

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.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pre…

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 t…

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.)

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#134
post #103
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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 num…

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.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#135

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 o…

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 incor…

[deleted]

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#136
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 num…

> 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...

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.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#137

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 o…

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 incor…

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.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#138

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 o…

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 incor…

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.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#139
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 num…

> 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...

But also please be aware that some of them aren't phony.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#140
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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…

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.
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