A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by periheli0n » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 8:55 PM UTC

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…

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.

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

#152

Post by oh_sigh » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

bb123 wrote: post #6

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.

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".

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

#153

Post by mrtnmcc » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 8:59 PM UTC

periheli0n wrote: post #151

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…

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.

Yes combining relatively independent sensors will increase the MI.

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

#154

Post by periheli0n » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:01 PM UTC

causi wrote: post #94

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.

100% agree. Great achievement by the 13 year old but insinuating that this device can detect pneumonia is utterly misleading.

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

#155

Post by trulyme » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

jboy55 wrote: post #105

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…

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.

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?

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

#156

Post by alexk307 » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:08 PM UTC

Mezzie wrote: post #148

cute_boi wrote: post #86

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…

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.

Just curious, what were you a prodigy at?

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

#157

Post by westurner » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:13 PM UTC

_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.

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?

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

#158

Post by worldvoyageur » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:13 PM UTC

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #140

worldvoyageur wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#159

Post by mdeck_ » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:13 PM UTC

jkaptur wrote: post #128

somebodynew wrote: post #69

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…

> 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).

> 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.

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

#160

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

worldvoyageur wrote: post #158

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

[deleted]