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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

#161

Post by _hl_ »

westurner wrote: post #157
_hl_ wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#162

Post by Mezzie »

alexk307 wrote: post #156
Mezzie wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#163

Post by honkycat »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #73
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 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.

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.

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

#164

Post by periheli0n »

mrtnmcc wrote: post #153
periheli0n wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#165

Post by throwaways85989 »

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…

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.

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

#166

Post by jkaptur »

mdeck_ wrote: post #159
jkaptur wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That would be great. I'm no ML expert, but my impression was that standards varied widely from team to team.

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

#167

Post by russellbeattie »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #23

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.

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.

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

#168

Post by inglor_cz »

honkycat wrote: post #144
inglor_cz wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I am from the Czech Republic. Our inequality is better than American, for sure, but we seem to be on the same track. Especially the gypsy ghettos are fairly bad. Not as bad as the worst places in the U.S., but shockingly bad for the middle of the EU. In neighboring Slovakia, some of the mud hut villages look like a mixture of the Middle Ages with rural Nepal. So I am not really sure if the better numbers aren't result of some creative statistics.

I still believe that Karikó's equipment was fairly bad, because I was alive in the 1980s and I remember the shortages of everything. Late stage Communism was all about stuff shortage. Either something was really plentiful (but usually of questionable quality), or very hard to acquire. This included school equipment. The first home computers spread some 10 years later than in the West and we regarded them almost as godly objects.

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

#169

Post by mrtnmcc »

periheli0n wrote: post #164
mrtnmcc wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes combining relatively independent sensors will increase the MI.

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.

Understood,the point was if the sensors are identical, they don't give any more information, some independence is needed.

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

#170

Post by dekhn »

Mezzie wrote: post #141
dekhn wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Note that Larry Page's parents did more than just to code. They embedded him from birth in the academic system so that he was prepared, at Stanford, to recognize the importance of, and capitalize upon the organic value of web content. He was also exposed to the Grateful Dead, which probably helped build a healthy dose of capitalism and libertarianism.

Similarly, I was raised in an academic environment exposed early to computers (4th grade) in a gifted and talented program that many other students didn't have access to. That same program was literally "grad school prep in elementary school" which meant that when I got to grad school, it wasn't like I was in some sort of foreign country; I was home. And when I finally got to google, eveyrthing there felt normal and natural since it was just an extension of grad school, but with more money and better sysadmins.

That said, I guess if you don't get a leg up as a kid and go on to be successful through grit you can always appreciate that your hard work and determination paid off?

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