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

blog.benjamin-cabe.com

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

#141

Post by Mezzie »

dekhn wrote: post #113
samhw wrote: 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…

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.

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?

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

#142

Post by servytor »

mrtnmcc wrote: post #129
ravenstine wrote: post #54

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…

https://www.wired.com/2010/02/ff-algorithm/

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

#143

Post by Damogran6 »

dekhn wrote: post #121
Damogran6 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cl…

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…

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.

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

#144

Post by honkycat »

inglor_cz wrote: post #120
honkycat wrote: post #62

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 probl…

"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. Bu…

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."

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

#145

Post by drekipus »

TuringNYC wrote: post #136
908B64B197 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

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

#146

Post by _hl_ »

westurner wrote: post #138
mrtnmcc wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#147

Post by deckar01 »

amelius wrote: post #25

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, s…

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...

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

#148

Post by Mezzie »

cute_boi wrote: post #86
alexk307 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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

#149

Post by mrtnmcc »

servytor wrote: post #142
mrtnmcc wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://www.wired.com/2010/02/ff-algorithm/

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".

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

#150

Post by dtech »

_hl_ wrote: post #146
westurner wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

You can, but it's called making stuff up
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