[HN Gopher] A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pn...
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A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
Author : kartben_
Score : 284 points
Date : 2022-02-17 14:18 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.benjamin-cabe.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.benjamin-cabe.com)
| alexk307 wrote:
| This is what happens when you give children the tools to succeed
| by teaching them math and science in ways that directly relate to
| their world view. Obviously, this kid is very bright, but giving
| kids the tools to understand how the ideas they're learning can
| be applied in the real world is so satisfying. They aren't
| blinded by previous failures, or the current market, or what can
| and can't be done.
| mrits wrote:
| Sometimes you give the children these tools and they decide to
| do something they are more interested in. It is important to
| realize that not all children are interested in sciences.
| alexk307 wrote:
| 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.
| cute_boi wrote:
| 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 prestigious universities
| like MIT and standford. The case is worst in China.
| Mezzie wrote:
| 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.
| alexk307 wrote:
| Just curious, what were you a prodigy at?
| Mezzie wrote:
| 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.
| alexk307 wrote:
| 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 to
| them.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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.)
| sam0x17 wrote:
| That said, every single kid who I knew growing up who had
| access to these sorts of opportunities but did something
| "more interesting" has ended up regretting it in adulthood.
| This probably isn't true across the board, but among the
| people I know it definitely is.
| rhexs wrote:
| Maybe. It's more like it's what a kid's parents do when kids
| can no longer be kids and are driven to start working on their
| college applications earlier and earlier.
|
| There's more to life than getting into MIT.
| foolinaround wrote:
| If the kid was innately driven to do this, a big win for the
| kid and for humanity...
|
| On the other hand, if the kid is 'coached' to look/identify,
| as you say, it is a sad state of affairs when kids are pushed
| into adulthood too soon...
|
| We have seen this for more than a decade also with the
| marketing practices around sexualization of fashion for
| younger and younger kids...
| kartben_ wrote:
| To briefly clarify on why I believe it is the former: Caleb
| just happened to have caught a really bad fungal pneumonia
| when he was 9yo, and that was his inspiration to explore
| what could be done to diagnose things differently. And he
| just happened to do tons of research to try and re-use open
| source technology, etc.
| alexk307 wrote:
| There's more to making electronics than getting into MIT and
| prestigious universities. I think a lot of the users on HN
| like myself enjoy creating things just to create them. I
| don't need prestige or accolades; just build something, break
| it, fix it, take it apart. Some people enjoy learning how
| things work.
| honkycat wrote:
| 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 problem with this article is this: We are constantly
| papering over how much of a difference a good education can make,
| and how little opportunity to get that quality of education there
| is in the United States.
|
| You often see people bemoaning their lot in life: "Ugh. When Mark
| Zuckerburg/Bill Gates/insert CEO was my age, they already started
| Microsoft!"
|
| And my reply to this sentiment is this: How many hundreds of
| thousands of dollars did your parents spend on your pre-
| university education? I'm willing to bet it wasn't in the
| hundreds of thousands.
|
| I see this kid is from LA. Sometimes all it takes is being in the
| right zip code to have access to... science fairs? My school
| didn't even have AP classes! I thought science fairs were
| something that only happened on TV.
|
| I realize this is a bit petty, and it 100% comes from my
| childhood where I went to a poor rural school where I was a poor
| student, and so-fucking-desperately wanted more, and then moved
| to the city, and succeeded, flourished once I got access to a
| better quality of education. But pretending it isn't there feels
| dishonest.
|
| It feels like an onion article headline: "Kid with everything
| going for him, despite all odds, tremendously succeeds"
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "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. But this is already
| stretching the meaning of "privilege".
|
| Katalin Kariko, one of the main brains behind mRNA, grew up in
| shabby Communist Hungary and her lab equipment at her home
| university was likely worse than what a median high school in
| the U.S. has at its disposal. (There wasn't much convertible
| currency east of the Iron Curtain to buy top stuff, and not
| enough capacity to manufacture it locally.)
| honkycat wrote:
| 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."
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| 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.
| honkycat wrote:
| 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.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| No he didnt. These type of fake child genius articlea are
| harmful.
| dekhn wrote:
| Does anybody have a link to what the kid actually did? I skimmed
| the video, looked at the diagram, read the original MAKE article,
| and it seems like the kid did a science project and it doesn't
| actually diagnose pneumonia. Am I missing something important?
|
| The reason I'm asking is that I see a lot of these (used to judge
| science fairs, worked with smart undergraduates who build their
| own equipment) but most of it overstates the technical advances
| made by the kid.
| jboy55 wrote:
| 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 this case,
| perhaps his mom is a Sr Engineer at a company producing
| artificial noses aimed at detecting pneumonia where she is in
| charge of developing dev-kits and SDKs that happen to include
| sample tensor flow models.
|
| What annoys me is that the story is often one of a kid, against
| all odds, learning all of this tech out of their own gumption.
| Where in the same science fare, 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.
| worldvoyageur wrote:
| 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 a lot out of helping the younger ones. There was
| excellent quality recent school work in evidence on the
| walls. Though I did occasionally pop by the school when I'd
| visit the site, I usually didn't.
|
| On one of my site visits I was asked if I wanted a detour
| from the project site to check out the school science fair. I
| later figured out that the minor scheduling difficulties I
| had around that particular visit was so that I'd be there on
| the day of the science fair.
|
| Every student had a project. There were a few of the usual
| suspects, like the baking soda volcano and potato battery.
| However, those were the exception. Most of the projects were
| astounding, well beyond what I'd seen as an engineering
| undergrad in university.
|
| The kids, standing proudly in front of their project and the
| bristol board explanations, knew very well how to explain the
| project and had a deep understanding of how it had come
| together. They'd definitely done the work and were
| justifiably proud.
|
| That said, the majority of the projects were such that they
| could only have been the product of many evenings and
| weekends over months of father[3]/child working together.
| I'll assume that work on the next science fair would have
| begun the day after the science fair I saw wrapped up.
|
| 1. Qinshan III, units 1 and 2;
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinshan_Nuclear_Power_Plant.
|
| 2. High school was a boarding school back in Canada.
|
| 3. I'm pretty sure that all the engineers were male, for I'd
| be remembering a female engineer, but the school kids were a
| balance mix of boys and girls.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| 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.
| worldvoyageur wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Damogran6 wrote:
| 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 class where the siblings and parents could
| compete...but it's the same kind of dynamic.
|
| I don't immediately see the issue with the parent helping a
| child with tech they're familiar with...helping my son 3d
| print and sell fidget spinners had lots of little life
| lessons wrapped up in it.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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 looked
| right and rolled properly, but beyond that it was all him.
| He didn't win any races, but wasn't bummed about it at all.
|
| Following that, I bought a bunch of pine blanks, read a few
| papers on how to make faster cars (those nail axles are
| REALLY DUMB), bought Fusion 360, designed a car, and flip-
| milled it on my personal CNC, over a period of a year (it's
| never raced). it amuses me to no end that imposter syndrome
| and OCD drove me to be a well-compensated software engineer
| with enough free time to build his own pinewood derby
| racecar in his own time on his own terms.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| 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.
| danachow wrote:
| No that's the point - there wasn't evidence that any of 1, 2,
| or 3 was ever done. Some mime guy puts together a gas sensor
| and tinyml setup - the kid makes some report on the
| _hypothetical_ ability to use to diagnose fungal pneumonia in
| reference to some papers in the literature, but I don't see
| actual evidence of an actual experiment.
| samhw wrote:
| > 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 number of stories like this. One comes to mind where one
| kid won a contest for designing a stockpicking algorithm, and
| it turned out - of course - that his mum was a fund manager
| at Goldman, specialising in that exact same area. I don't
| know what the point of it is. Is there not more to life than
| gaming university applications?
| TuringNYC wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| samhw wrote:
| Precisely. You can definitely see the downstream effects
| of this, too, with lots of academics who see great
| success by publishing total tripe in well-packaged books
| (see: Malcolm Gladwell, the entire field of social
| psychology, etc).
| Mezzie wrote:
| 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?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > 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...
| TuringNYC wrote:
| 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.
| drekipus wrote:
| > 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.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| But also please be aware that some of them aren't phony.
| javajosh wrote:
| The MC knows what the crowd wants to see. If there is some
| contest, they will make sure the most attractive person wins.
| This is what the crowd wants, and the losers have no
| reasonable basis to protest and if they do they'll be
| (falsely) accused of being poor sports. Most attractive
| people don't know what's really happening, and assume their
| win is real.
|
| The thing is, I get it. There's a wholesome excitement around
| the idea of discovery and you want to do your part and not be
| a wet blanket. And it's a white lie that is good for society
| - if not for the ego of the hero. You want there to be a new
| discovery, that came out of nowhere, because that's the
| better story. It's the kind of Myth that a good society runs
| on, and needs, even if it's false, because the real out-of-
| nowhere discovery stories happen too infrequently to be of
| use.
|
| The best thing to do, really, is to give the kid a medal, and
| shut up about it not being real, and hope to high heaven he
| isn't misled by the easy victory.
| samhw wrote:
| "Attractive"? Do you mean this in some kind of figurative
| sense? If not, then I'm really not at all sure that that's
| how science fairs are decided.
| javajosh wrote:
| samhw wrote:
| I'm afraid I don't follow you
| [deleted]
| pdepip wrote:
| Does anyone have any recommended reading or resources for someone
| interested in getting involved in similar work?
| beeforpork wrote:
| > No door is ever closed. You can do anything! I am a thirteen-
| year-old kid, and I can do this--if I can do it, anyone can!
|
| If only a goal of education was to get kids to feel like this! Of
| course, not everyone is equally bright, but without the above
| attitude, they will not even try, not even try to be interested,
| because they think they are too dumb, which is a tragedy.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > No door is ever closed. You can do anything!
|
| This is obvious nonsense. Limitations are real, and I think it's
| better to be honest about them.
|
| Edit: I was wrong to post this shallow dismissal; see below.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| Damn, the courage it must've taken to scold a child on a
| internet website -- how did you summon it? Do you have a
| patreon I can donate to
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Fair point. It would have been better for me to keep silent
| and just let the thought pass.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| Now that's real courage. Sincere salute to owning your
| shit!
| pcmoney wrote:
| I agree but there is a self fulfilling aspect to thinking that
| way.
|
| It is better to believe anything is possible and be wrong than
| to impose limitations on ourselves.
|
| Most great accomplishments seem impossible at first.
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| the-dude wrote:
| I wonder what his parents do for a living. Just curious.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| In 9th grade I took first in a Science State championship
| competition. I didn't just win, I blew the competition away,
| and it changed how people approached the competition for the
| next 20 years. My device was ugly, large, obtuse, poor. People
| laughed at it. The favorite in the competition was this slick
| device that rumor had it was designed and manufactured by their
| father's engineering company. Everyone laughed, that is, until
| my ugly device performed like a Lambo in comparison to their
| Ford Pinto.
|
| My father? A smart, but not affluent, guy who thought hard on
| things. He's the one that actually invented the device...but I
| learned a few things along the way.
|
| Parents absolutely help children become high achievers, but it
| doesn't always mean it was attached to their day job. Having
| attentive parents is a privilege.
|
| note: As for the device, it was just a little car powered by a
| weight.
| csdvrx wrote:
| Does it matter? Watching everything through the myopic lens of
| "privilege" is wrong.
|
| A kid can have an idea and parents can help. For now, the set
| of {kids, parents} that can do that is limited. But technology
| changes and becomes more accessible. What matters is the new
| things that become not just possible but easy and cheap.
|
| For a previously "costly" problem that in 2012 would involve a
| 5 MP digital pictures + geotagging + OCR then sending the raws
| for GPU processing, any random smartphone from 2022 will do.
|
| In 2012 you could have screamed "privilege!". Not in 2022.
|
| As a kid, I'd have loved to try to hack together a app that
| recognizes mushrooms (or flowers, or fruits which I all found
| so super interesting, especially bugs and OMG they fly if I
| blew on them!!)
|
| It would have been hard. I would have benefited from some help.
| But I would have had a lot of fun, after which I would have
| used the app to fill in the name for my leaf-book collection
| effort (I wanted to have a specimen of EVERYTHING from the
| garden, then from the street, then...)
|
| I only had books and some websites and a bad camera. So I drew
| :) A kid now could have picture search engines like yandex to
| do better with a much better camera too (MACRO MODE!) and some
| generic photo processing software. A rich kid then could have
| had something similar, with an expansive Nikon camera, and
| photoshop (crop, filter...) and maybe some parental connections
| to biologists and botanists.
|
| Is it privilege if they did? Yes. And it's wonderful because
| every kid has this privilege now! And they can have more fun!
| gedy wrote:
| I didn't take OP as a commentary on privilege, more if the
| parents were already working in this field/area, vs the "boy
| genius" narrative
| kartben_ wrote:
| spoiler alert: none of them work in this field/area.
| the-dude wrote:
| Thank you.
| cinntaile wrote:
| It does when the title says "13yo kid builds e-nose". It's
| not about privilege, it's about being honest. Maybe the title
| is honest and the kid is just very bright, that's cool too!
| csdvrx wrote:
| Yet most people seem to be jumping to the conclusion,
| making assumptions, and letting their views taint their
| judgment, without even knowing all the facts (see a comment
| below asking if the parents were already working in the
| field)
| orf wrote:
| You wrote a 300 word response full of jumped-to
| conclusions, assumptions etc to someone just asking what
| his parents did.
| csdvrx wrote:
| Read the other comments and see the implications from
| that seemingly innocent question.
| honkycat wrote:
| > Does it matter? Watching everything through the myopic lens
| of "privilege" is wrong.
|
| May I ask why?
|
| You see it all the time, unironically: "How a 23 year old
| couple bought their dream home!" and it ends up in the
| article their parents literally paid for it.
|
| Or Bill Gates. There is the classic: "How to become as rich
| as Bill Gates: Choose your grandparents carefully."
|
| I see it elsewhere in this thread: "Ugh. And MY 13 year old
| just wants to play video games!" And that is unfair to
| themselves, and unfair to their kids.
|
| You see it everywhere. So many musicians, artists, writers,
| PEOPLE succeed in part because they just don't need to make
| money. Because they already have it.
|
| And then they act like it was all done themselves and while
| they are not bad people for having money, and they are
| sincerely talented, that isn't the whole story. The whole
| story is that they didn't ever really even need to succeed to
| live a comfortable life, and that is a HUGE advantage over
| other people.
|
| ---------
|
| Allow me to tie this to my own experience:
|
| First, I want to acknowledge that I am extremely privileged
| in my own ways. I grew up in a wonderful home with a great
| family. We were educated, and kind, and loved reading and
| were encouraging. The rural place I grew up in wasn't a fancy
| high-tech metropolis, but I did not experience any violence
| in my community which counts for a lot.
|
| I went to a private university on a big scholarship. It was
| cheaper than any state school I could have gone to. My first
| two years where I was in the dorms and was paying with
| student loans, I was very active in the student volunteer
| community, and the computer science club.
|
| But once I left the dorms, that was IT. I needed to 100%
| support myself, rent/food/etc. I spent my days working manual
| QA for a software company, 40/hr week, while attending school
| at night.
|
| And my life changed. I didn't make any new friends and lost
| the ones I had. I was never around for the "college stuff."
| Every waking moment became toil, either through work or
| through school.
|
| While my peers were doing research studies for natural
| language processing, or participating in CS contests, or
| building relationships, or falling in love, or actually doing
| well on homework and tests, or any number of productive
| things, I was plugging 3g WIFI dongles into and out of
| laptops for $15/hr. I was running test cases for 8 hours a
| day, then going to class from 6-9, then doing homework until
| I went to sleep, then getting up in the morning and doing it
| again.
|
| And the deficit I had in my education followed me for a LONG
| time. Still follows me today.
|
| So yes, I do think we should interrogate situation people
| were in when they achieved something. Because sometimes
| people don't really achieve anything other than spending
| their parent's money.
|
| And there are circumstances where something that seems like a
| big achievement was really just an inevitability.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Pause a second and look at what you wrote and what you're
| responding to. You're arguing very passionately against a
| straw man, nobody mentioned privilege until you did.
| csdvrx wrote:
| the-dude wrote:
| I was just curious and very aware of the possible
| blowback. I even doubted for a while to delete the
| comment ( no shallow dismissals ).
|
| But it isn't and it is a question that comes along with
| the subject of 13yo geniuses.
|
| I was curious and now I have an answer ( not from you ).
|
| edit: In a broader, more contemporary frame : It is now
| we need to be ever more critical of news we get served
| and rejecting that under the guise of 'think of the
| children' is just lame.
| [deleted]
| cruano wrote:
| > A kid can have an idea and parents can help.
|
| Or... the other way around
| technicolorwhat wrote:
| Pretty awesome project really! As a sidenote: A bunch of the ML
| training and edge deployment magic is done via
| https://edgeimpulse.com which seems to make it much more
| accessible to build such a thing.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I remember having an assignment like this my second year of
| college. It was basically an array of various smoke detector
| sensors wired up to a parallel port. With diverse enough sensors,
| you could stick a cup into a box with a fan and the sensor, and
| be able to tell if the cup had OJ, coke, or coffee in it using
| basic PCA.
|
| Given the tools available now, I'm not surprised a smart 13yo
| could build something like this. Especially if the sensor itself
| is an off-the-shelf component with device drivers and such
| already available for it.
| Herodotus38 wrote:
| I wish I could read the paper. I'm interested in what kind of
| fungal pneumonia they were looking at. My googling got me to find
| the title on the Middle School Facebook page but not sure if it's
| available ti read.
| kartben_ wrote:
| I'll check with Caleb but I am guessing/hoping he will be
| willing to make the paper more broadly accessible soon.
| Herodotus38 wrote:
| Thanks, for reference I am a hospital physician (internal
| medicine) so I do occasionally deal with fungal pneumonia.
| thatcat wrote:
| I doubt that it is possible to differentiate between fungal
| types using gas sensors trained on spores being released.
| Herodotus38 wrote:
| I would be interested in what they are testing, it probably
| wouldn't be spores but likely something along the lines of
| biochemical compounds specific to certain species. For
| example we use blood tests for the presence of
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactomannan to help
| diagnose invasive aspergillosis.
| causi wrote:
| 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.
| periheli0n wrote:
| 100% agree. Great achievement by the 13 year old but
| insinuating that this device can detect pneumonia is utterly
| misleading.
| donio wrote:
| Unfortunately there is no other way to signal trash
| submissions. "Not upvoting" is not really a sufficient signal
| when enough people get baited by the headline.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| 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.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| 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.
| efdee wrote:
| You rebooted the router? Without prior warning?
|
| That's the 2020 equivalent of your parents picking up the phone
| while you're online on dialup.
| fortran77 wrote:
| My 13-year-old cat can probably sniff out pneumonia. If only he
| could talk and tell us what he's smelling.
| nickkell wrote:
| All the signs were there. If only we had eyes to see them!
| honkycat wrote:
| She's a child. I'm sure this kid has his moments as well.
|
| Harboring resentment for your teenager for being moody is like
| the frog and the scorpion. it is in their nature!
|
| Not to say isn't maddening, mind you.
| NavinF wrote:
| > why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router
|
| I'm with her on this one. Not announcing the outage before it
| happens is kinda disrespectful.
| didip wrote:
| Did you send a downtime notification to her and update your
| family's status page?
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Yes, I did but I forgot to send her notification on our
| Discord channel too.
| martneumann wrote:
| "Daaad, are you complaining about me on the Internet again?!"
| ;)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > and why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary
| router.
|
| Basic sysops rule: either create redundancy (which is hard to
| do in a consumer space outside of Mac Pro machines as 99.99% of
| laptops carry only a single LAN port and in towers, about 3/4)
| or warn your users before doing maintenance.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Well, I do have backups. This is India, so I even have a
| backup for the backup. I have three ISPs load-balanced, and
| not experienced any downtime since the beginning of the
| Pandemic (early 2020). I do realize them going down but we
| never realize until I looked them up.
|
| It runs almost all the time, but sometimes I need to update
| settings, etc. which needs reboots the load balancer that
| distributes everything from.
|
| :-)
| blitzar wrote:
| And you cant do this durring a) the school day when the
| primary end user is not home or b) wake up at 2am and
| reboot it while the primary end user is asleep?
|
| Honestly, I think your kid should break out the SLA and
| check what compensation they get paid for prime time
| outages.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Yes, lesson learnt and we have agreed to the new
| agreement -- no more primetime outages -- planned or
| otherwise.
| dkersten wrote:
| I mean, another solution is to give warning at regular
| intervals beforehand (day, hour, ten minutes, 1 minute
| perhaps). Basically planned outages with ample warning.
| Of course, avoiding prime time planned outages is always
| good in any scenario and I'm sure goes a long way to keep
| all clients happy.
|
| With that said, I doubt your 13 year old daughter client
| is actually paying for that level of service, so... ;-)
| blitzar wrote:
| I believe the SLA for a 13 year old is 110% uptime, with
| consequences being _The end of the world_.
|
| I am not a lawyer so feel free to go to court claiming
| that 100% uptime is the limits of mathematics or that the
| world will not end if <insert social media platform of
| choice> is not accessible for 5 minutes on a tuesday
| afternoon. Its a losing case every time, best just to
| settle up the case quietly with an extra scoop of
| icecream or some robux and cut your losses.
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _why I din 't warned her before rebooting the primary
| router._
|
| I'd be pissed too. You don't mess with the router without
| warning people using it ;)
| nexuist wrote:
| Wonder where she got that from?
| amelius wrote:
| 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,
| so from that point of view it is noteworthy.
| hwillis wrote:
| The sensor (the four gas sensors on the board) was created by a
| third person.
|
| The artificial nose is the TinyML model which trains on the
| sensor data (CO, NO2, ethanol, VOCs) to detect arbitrary scents
| by their signatures in those four categories.
|
| The fungal pneumonia detector wires up a whole API with azure
| etc. and trains the model specifically to recognize pneumonia,
| based on an actual science experiment which grew and measured
| the fungus in artificial lungs.
|
| As far as I'm concerned, both Caleb and Benjamin had brilliant
| ideas, executed them fantastically, and created something that
| may be truly useful. A $40 sensor that can detect disease just
| by breathing on it is more of a tangible contribution to
| humanity than many software engineers make in their life and
| almost certainly more than 99% of us did before the age of 14.
| amelius wrote:
| The reason why no engineer has made this yet, is because the
| medical data was not available to them.
|
| The innovation is in the data, not in the ML.
| hwillis wrote:
| You are wrong. The kid GREW FUNGUS IN ARTIFICIAL LUNGS
| using a sterile field made out of a plastic bin with dish
| gloves cut into it. He didn't need medical data. Anyone
| could have done this- anyone with the intelligence and
| creativity that this kid has.
| dekhn wrote:
| is it possible you're overstating what the kid did a bit
| here? The history of sterile fields shows that even great
| scientists take decades to debug contamination that
| causes false positives and negatives. ASn experiment like
| this can be easily thrown off by any number of variables
| that weren't carefully controlled for.
| amelius wrote:
| You need medical data if you want to validate your
| results for a real medical disorder.
|
| Fabrication of data is not very useful if you have to
| gather data for validation anyway.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > The innovation is in the data, not in the ML.
|
| can't you kind of say this about all ML? That the main
| driver in ML is 99% the quality of the training data and 1%
| the specific details of the neural networks used?
| amelius wrote:
| For most real-world applications of ML, yes. Of course,
| what happens in ML-research is different (where e.g. new
| networks for new modalities are invented).
|
| But back to the topic, I bet the kid didn't even invent
| their own neural network topology, but just pulled a
| predefined network from a library, perhaps without even
| knowing it. Which is ok, because that is how most people
| use ML.
| wesleywt wrote:
| It is great that the kid is involved and interested in these
| technologies. Whether it works is another issue. You are
| going to need metrics such a LODs, LOQs, sensitivity and
| specificity to determine if this beats the gold standard
| tests.
| deckar01 wrote:
| 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...
| kartben_ wrote:
| With this reasoning, aren't most things a work of plumbing, and
| nothing ever really new? And isn't it how innovation happens,
| at the end of the day?
| tinc293 wrote:
| Well, first of all, you can see those glove holes are too
| small, that's not the hands of a 13-year-old who mines his
| own silica. Disgraceful.
| dkersten wrote:
| I think the news is less _" 13 year old revolutionized
| medicine"_ and more _" 13 year old used ingenuity to create
| cool thing"_. Or at least, that's how I think it should be
| read. Focusing too much on the end result is likely not the
| best outcome because, while its a working prototype, many
| interesting prototypes never make it to fully end user capable
| system and there are a lot of hurdles to overcome to get it
| there.
|
| But that doesn't take away from the fact that its a cool
| project and the kid did a great job in coming up with it and
| executing on it! Its definitely far beyond what most people
| achieve, nevermind 13 year olds.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| This is a story about inspiration and achievement. Objective
| facts are less important than the message, IMO, especially
| after decades of "try-hard" being ridiculed in the U.S.
| foolinaround wrote:
| we need to identify the factors that enabled this awesome kid to
| have the background knowledge, tools, environment etc and see how
| we can replicate them to find other such diamonds in the wild...
| rebelde wrote:
| I highly suspect that his parents "have the background
| knowledge, tools, environment etc".
| blueatlas wrote:
| To what end? Our world is not short of this kind of talent, at
| any age. Those that have these abilities will get there, in
| time. So maybe it would be better at that age to teach them to
| paint, throw a baseball, fly fish, travel, etc.
| foolinaround wrote:
| Why should they be taught to paint or to throw a baseball but
| not to use a tool (like a program, etc)
|
| I was merely saying that the knowledge and facilities to
| paint, to play baseball or program should be accessible, and
| kids must be exposed to the fact that they exist... then, the
| kids pick per their inclination?
| em-bee wrote:
| knowledge does not motivate people to do great things.
|
| what children need to learn first and foremost is to be
| good people, create the desire to help others and
| contribute to society.
|
| once they have that, they drive themselves to learn what
| they need in order to achieve that.
|
| this kid here had the drive to solve a problem because they
| had experienced it themselves. it doesn't matter how they
| solved it and how much help they got, what matters is what
| drove them to solve the problem in the first place.
|
| if we can create that drive then any of the above, whether
| it is art, sports or programming will happen based on the
| kids motivation.
| Ataraxiaist wrote:
| We seem to have a strange anti-intellectual bias in our culture
| when it comes to children.
|
| I mean I was not pushed hard as a kid to play guitar or play
| football/wrestling but I was pushed. It took quite a bit of
| time before I really fell in love with playing guitar. It is
| hard to fall in love with something when you suck at it. I
| needed to be pushed. Sports were fun at the time but we
| completely overstate the value of organized sports IMO.
|
| I don't know why we see playing a musical instrument as
| something different than learning scientific instruments. We
| expect the kid to just naturally be driven in science from day
| one and pushing them is seen as something morally off.
|
| It reminds me of the crazy hockey parent that pushes their kid
| way too hard in hockey. While some kids might end up hating
| hockey, a huge % just end up being really good hockey players
| compared to the average person. People tend to fall in love
| with things they are good at.
|
| I am childfree but if I did have a kid I would be a science
| version of the hockey parent and let the chips fall as they
| may. The risk/reward is just massive for the kid.
| croes wrote:
| >No door is ever closed. You can do anything! I am a thirteen-
| year-old kid, and I can do this--if I can do it, anyone can!
|
| For some, doors are not only closed, but they are also slammed in
| their faces with full force
| bb123 wrote:
| 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.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| Yes, seems like people really want to believe stories of
| teenagers suddenly making breakthrough discoveries. In this
| case it's probably having some sensors with data, throwing them
| into a neural network and getting good results on a training
| set. The question is, does it work at all on real world data...
| munificent wrote:
| I think the important part is to understand that the primary
| goal here is not to advance science. We have lots of adult
| scientists with better education, time, equipment doing that.
|
| It's to improve the pipeline of kids excited to go into science
| by making science accessible, rewarding, and prestigious.
| ssewell wrote:
| I, for one, am one of those people. However, after watching a
| few minutes of the linked video, I'm convinced (and pleasantly
| surprised) that Caleb has firm grasp on his design, and
| honestly sounds like he was the driving force behind his own
| particular implementation.
| kartben_ wrote:
| This. Thanks for taking the time to watch the video to form
| your own opinion!
| rocgf wrote:
| Yes, always, since it's exaggerated more often than not.
| [deleted]
| oh_sigh wrote:
| 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".
| wjp3 wrote:
| I'm immediately reminded of the science fair projects in
| elementary school where it was clearly obvious that the parent
| did all of the work.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| I agree, these clickbait articles are rarely honest and most of
| them reek of parents trying to turn their children into
| (internet) celebreties.
|
| Also I noticed that they typically employ a very common pattern
| in which the headline makes a truly big claim (e.g. "10 year
| old invents cheap way to purify any water source"), then
| afterwards it turns out that this claim is far from accurate
| (e.g. the child did not invent it himself, had massive help and
| while the solution technically works it is in not feasible at
| all in the way the headline suggests).
|
| Once it is noticed that the claim is false in the way it is
| presented the article then gets defended by pointing out that a
| child that young coming into contact with such a project is
| still impressive, which is again technically true but
| ultimately comes off as a dishonest deflection.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| The international science fair is a good example. I grew up
| with a couple of people who would participate every year, and
| every year it was obvious from their academics and being in the
| same classrooms and social circles as them that they didn't
| come up with this stuff. Their projects were gigantic, expertly
| researched, and featured technology that no high school student
| in the pre-internet age would have been able to source or use
| independently. One of them had a single mother with a PhD in
| the field, the other had a science teacher mother and a father
| with an MS in biomedical engineering... in the same field.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > turns out to be bogus
|
| Sometimes very bogus, even totally fake
|
| example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otjvUz7qKXc ('free
| energy' device, "invented" by a kid, debunked by electroboom)
| cmaneu wrote:
| Did you watch the video linked in the article?
| [deleted]
| wesleywt wrote:
| Specific, sensitivity, limits of detection and limits of
| quantitation is more important than a video.
| kartben_ wrote:
| Interestingly, those are all very good points, all of
| which are being covered ...in the video.
| thatcat wrote:
| I mean this is a cool application, but not original idea.
| Gas/particulate sensors are used in ag to detect fungal spore
| concentration zones for spot treatment by looking for a
| specific particle size using the laser in the sensor. The worst
| part about these type articles is that they don't even cover
| the design usually so you can't tell if it's a novel idea or
| not. This one features hand drawn diagram with some incubator
| system, I guess it's for training purposes but idk. Mostly it
| seems like this is an advertorial for Microsoft AI.
| hwillis wrote:
| If you watch the video it's very apparent that the kid deeply
| knows how everything works. If he did not make this entire
| (very impressive) project himself, he certainly could have. He
| understands how chemicals interact with the various gas sensors
| (used limonene, pine and seed oils as test substances), how the
| model works, how to grow fungus in a sterile environment to get
| training data, how to get an API together to service the
| device...
| colechristensen wrote:
| Yeah it's usually "adult who knows how to do a thing presents
| kid with all of the pieces and guidance to make it happen".
| Which is great, you should do that for kids, but the articles
| about it usually make one cringe.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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 other reasons besides
| some sort of infection in the lung, and VOCs are incredibly hard
| to differentiate with just a sensor. The fact that they tend to
| be faint in human breath even at their highest (in contrast to O2
| and CO2) doesn't help. Even the most expensive PID sensors for
| VOCs (they get up into the several hundreds a pop) can't really
| tell you whether the predominant gas is acetone or alcohol or
| acetaldehyde or hydrogen sulfide. So you've got to figure out
| whether the presence of VOCs is truly an anomaly and not just a
| part of ketosis. In which case you will also need to measure _at
| least_ VeO2 to see whether the VOCs correspond with the
| Respiratory Quotient.
|
| The "e-nose" project, as described on the MakeZine article,
| doesn't appear to do that. It _does_ have an alcohol sensor. But
| these sensors aren 't particularly sophisticated. They use
| semiconductors with heating elements to detect the presence of
| gases, and there is almost certainly some overlap between the
| alcohol and VOCs sensors.
|
| If VOCs are produced by pneumonia, then yes, it's conceivable
| that even just the VOCs sensor alone would detect this. But can
| this group of sensors used in the e-nose differentiate pneumonia
| from catabolism?
|
| Maybe? -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| After all, this thing uses _AI_. And _maybe_ AI can recognize
| something that a human can 't by simply looking at a line graph.
| _I dunno..._ Such things should be tested against known inputs
| before being suggested to diagnose anything.
| somebodynew wrote:
| 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
| responses contains some hidden information that could help to
| discriminate between vanillin and eugenol. With enough
| different sensors, there's quite a bit of information to be
| found in mining their undefined behavior.
|
| That is to say, you can treat the sensor reading as being
| completely meaningless and skip interpreting it as indicating
| VOC levels. You're just using the sensors as black boxes that
| produce arbitrary values with the property that exposure to
| organic vapor changes the output "somehow", and letting model
| training find some meaning in it.
| xvector wrote:
| Does this mean that each sensor cluster has to be trained
| independently?
| joshvm wrote:
| 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.
| somebodynew wrote:
| When this technique is performing at its best, I would
| expect so. The old story of the evolved FPGA comes to mind:
| https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
|
| You're intentionally depending on the "personality" of each
| gas sensor to get data measuring unknown features, so you
| can't expect consistency from sample to sample. Anything
| that was completely portable between different sensors
| would inherently be less powerful.
| jkaptur wrote:
| > 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).
| mdeck_ wrote:
| > 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.
| jkaptur wrote:
| That would be great. I'm no ML expert, but my impression
| was that standards varied widely from team to team.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| He was specifically looking to identify _fungal pneumonia_ not
| just any old kind of pneumonia.
|
| The linked Wikipedia article indicates mortality in
| immunocompromised patients can be as high as 90 percent. That
| sentence fits with my general impression that fungal pneumonia
| is both real serious shit and also typically found in people
| with advanced cases of other serious medical problems, like
| AIDS or cystic fibrosis.
|
| It sounds reasonably plausible to me that it's feasible to
| detect fungal pneumonia in specific this way with some
| reasonable confidence level.
| jboy55 wrote:
| 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.
| trulyme wrote:
| 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?
| mrtnmcc wrote:
| 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 incorporates sensor
| noise/variability). If the sensor only produces X bits of
| information, no algorithm will be able to extract more classes
| than that. In the SCIO case it was just under 8 bits total of
| information. So something like a poor color sensor. You could
| train on apples and oranges and maybe do an investor demo, but
| it's not actually going to do anything useful (as the
| Kickstarter crowd soon learned).
| periheli0n wrote:
| 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.
| mrtnmcc wrote:
| Yes combining relatively independent sensors will increase
| the MI.
| periheli0n wrote:
| 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.
| throwaways85989 wrote:
| 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.
| servytor wrote:
| https://www.wired.com/2010/02/ff-algorithm/
| mrtnmcc wrote:
| 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".
| [deleted]
| londons_explore wrote:
| 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.
| westurner wrote:
| 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.
| _hl_ wrote:
| 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.
| westurner wrote:
| 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?
| _hl_ wrote:
| 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.
| dtech wrote:
| You can, but it's called making stuff up
| chokma wrote:
| I have a mid-price gadget for measuring inside air quality - it
| detects VOC and formaldehyde, along with PM2.5 / PM 10.
|
| It also detects alcohol from drinking a couple of beers as a
| dangerous increase in formaldehyde...
| Fordec wrote:
| From working on the environmental sensor side of things, I'd
| concur. The VOCs will be able to be picked up, but the cross
| talk will be huge across _other_ VOCs that don 't themselves
| indicate pneumonia. There isn't one VOC, there's thousands.
| False positives are written all over this. This is the very
| same approach Theranos went. On a science level, sure,
| technically possible maybe. You'll even get boolean outputs.
| But on an engineering and regulatory level, you're in for a
| world of pain without the spectral tech that is still 2-5 years
| away before this is worth basing human lives on.
| daenz wrote:
| Great on Caleb for this accomplishment!
|
| >No door is ever closed. You can do anything! I am a thirteen-
| year-old kid, and I can do this--if I can do it, anyone can!
|
| Although he may have similar opportunities to his peers, he
| (understandably) doesn't yet realize that he has a "spark" that
| not everyone is fortunate enough to cultivate. Age is not
| strictly the limiting factor to being capable of reaching a high
| potential.
| zht wrote:
| not to mention a stable home life and parents who have the
| ability/time/resources to provide a kid an environment to be
| curious about this stuff
| 99_00 wrote:
| I had no idea there was an e-nose project out there. Is e-nose a
| field with active research or is it something that's seen as
| being just too hard/cross disciplinary?
|
| I see robust e-nose as being a huge development that would change
| how we see the world.
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