Wireless Virtual Reality

There are many different new and amazing developments in modern technology happening everyday. One of them is virtual reality in which people can experience a false reality through the lens of VR goggles. If the development of virtual reality wasn't enough, researchers have developed wireless VR goggles which allows people to be mobile as they experience an alternate world. There was a development in the device because the HDMI chords attached to computers processing data lead to people tripping over chords while they walked around using the goggles.

One of the problems with making the device wireless was the fact that the device originally didn't support advance data processing even with wires and streaming the data without wires would be even harder to support. The researchers decided to try mmWaves which are high frequency waves that were thought to be able to help the device work wirelessly. One downside of these waves are that they do not work well with obstacles which a person is likely to encounter if they don't use the headset in a completely empty room. Researchers at MIT developed a mirror called MoVR that reflects waves at programmable angles instead of reflecting it at the same angle it comes in like it normally would. This allows the VR headset to be used with obstacles and to avoid losing signal. 

The researchers have been able to get the VR device to work but are looking to make the hardware more compact as it is much larger than a person would feel comfortable having on their face. They are also looking to make the waves compatible in order to have the ability to allow multiple devices in a room for multiplayer virtual worlds to exist wirelessly. 

References:

https://www.eecs.mit.edu/news-events/media/enabling-wireless-virtual-reality

http://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/wearables/review-samsungs-virtual-reality-glasses-gear-vr-are-really-here-but-are-they-really-worth-buying/news-story/8055338addf88802c5ba1b913242c42d

Stanford University Using Language Analysis for Crisis Hotlines

Many people around the world suffer from different mental health disorders. Among those disorders is depression and anxiety which are two diseases that can affect how a person functions on a day to day basis with relationships, academics, and work life. Crisis hotlines have been put in place to help people suffering with these mental health issues so that they can talk through any bad thoughts they may be having.
There has been a recent emergence in crisis hotlines that can be reached via text. Now instead of calling the hotline and talking to a stranger, people with mental health issues can text throughout the day about how they may be feeling. Graduate students at Stanford University have analyzed hundreds of thousands of texts from the thousands of text conversations between  people with mental health disorders and the counselors at the crisis hotline. They were looking to find a way to determine whether a textual conversation had been effective or not. The researchers looked at natural language analysis to determine whether a certain way of texting improved the way the person felt after the conversation.

The researchers found that the successful conversations all had five stages to them (Introduction, problem setting, problem exploration, problem solving, and wrap up of the conversation) that were all marked by key words. The researchers are hoping that by analyzing the language of the crisis counselors, they may be able to generate an automated counseling system to increase the amount of people that can be helped. They are also hoping to use artificial intelligence to make the automated counseling seem more human-like and approachable for a person who has a mental health disorder.

MIT Develops Autonomous Scooter

With self driving cars on the rise, it is quite easy to forget that there are other forms of transportation that can be used hands free. A new vehicle to join this group is autonomous scooters. Scooters used by the elderly and disabled have now been developed to be hands free for easier use by the rider. The software for the scooter was developed by MIT 's artificial intelligence and Computer Science Lab with help from the National University of Singapore and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. This is helpful technology because it allows people who are mobility impaired to have easier forms of transportation. The scooter can be used both indoors and outdoors but the researchers at the university are working on making the scooter maneuver around tight spaces.

The researchers has many layers of software. There is a low level control algorithm that allows the vehicle to respond immediately to changes in the surrounding environment. This includes avoiding objects and pedestrians in the path of the scooter. There is also a route planning algorithm that the vehicle uses to figure out where it is on a map. The control algorithm for the scooters is also used for golf carts and city cars which is beneficial because it allows for uniformity and easier understanding of the systems. In addition, this uniformity allows for information to be transferred easily across vehicles and reduces the complexity when developing the vehicles.

These autonomous scooters are a great development for our increasingly disabled-friendly world. Now not only will we have doors that open automatically for wheelchairs like most buildings have implemented, but we will now have transportation for people lack mobility so they too can also lead an autonomous lifestyle.

References:

https://www.eecs.mit.edu/news-events/media/driverless-vehicle-options-now-include-scooters

http://www.theonion.com/graphic/new-tandem-mobility-scooter-released-33043

Data Corruption

If you have read any of my previous blog posts, you may have seen that I have already discussed data analysis in depth. If you are unaware of data analysis or have forgotten what it is, it is simply the process of analyzing and modeling data to find out useful information and make conclusions about the data. At MIT, there are researchers in the Computer Science sector that have created a new set of algorithms that “can efficiently fit probability distributions to high- dimensional data” (MIT, 2016). This is helpful because many of the apps and websites we use everyday are high-dimensional data and knowing how to solve their corruption, if it happens to occur, is very beneficial to making our lives easier.

How data works is that if it contains corrupted lines, it could lead to the the standard data- fitting technique breaking down and causing the data to not function properly. Having data with many dimensions, with an immense amount of lines of code, makes having any form of a corruption much harder to detect and correct. The researchers at MIT found that using the median to find the mean of the data is less likely to yield corrupted data than an algorithm that uses the average. They took this into consideration when trying to form an algorithm. 

Commonly, Computer scientists often use 2-D cross sections of the graph of the data to test whether or not they look like “Gaussian distributions”. Gaussian distributions are continuous functions that estimate the exact binomial distribution of events. Data that does not look like Gaussian distributions likely has corruption within it. They used the concept of Gaussian and combined it with a common distribution called "product distribution" and used it to create an algorithm with efficiency and applicability to the real world as its central focus. 

References:

https://www.eecs.mit.edu/news-events/media/finding-patterns-corrupted-data

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_analysis

Voting Machines and Their Lack of Safety

With the hilarious, sad, and downright generally lacking presidential election that is occurring, it is hard to not pay attention as this election process plays out. November 8^th is coming and this is probably one of the most important elections for eligible voters to actually get out to vote in.

Researchers at Princeton University, in addition to some Computer Science graduate students, worked to see how they could hack a voting machine to change the outcome of a casted vote to test the security of the voting system.  A professor, by the name of Andrew Appel, and many other professors and graduate students showed how they could hack the AVC (Advantage Voting Machines) used in many states. They found that when they studied the source code of the AVC Advantage that it does not follow best software engineering practices and that the Independent Test Authority report does not accurately and sufficiently assess the security of the AVC Advantage. There were at least two program bugs that slipped through the ITA review according the professors.

There were also some ‘user interface design flaws’ of the AVC Advantage which has the potential to cause inaccuracy in recording votes. Ballots are prepared and results are tallied with a Windows application called “WinEDS” that runs on computers. ‘The votes cast on an individual machine are recorded in the same cartridge, which poll workers bring to election headquarters after polls close. The voting machines are left at the polling places for a few days until the trucking company picks them up at election headquarters in each county’. This allows ample time for a dedicated and fully intentioned hacker to do their work. In addition, the source code of the WinEds application appears to be written by another company and sold to AVC Advantage. This could lead to loss of accuracy and reliability because the company that creates and issues the voting machines didn’t even write the code it uses which could lead to some holes in security.

When it comes to something such as voting for a president for one of the most influential countries in the world, there should be greater research into how to make the voting system safer so that it can truly reflect a Democracy.

References:

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/appel-evt09.pdf

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-elections-russia-hack-how-to-hack-an-election-in-seven-minutes-214144

http://citp.princeton.edu/research/voting/

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/news/princeton-computer-science-hub-voting-technology-policy

Algorithm Connecting Students at MIT

There are approximately seven billion people in the world who live both near and far from us. With advancements in technology we are able to connect with people from all walks of life and just about every part of the world. Two MIT graduate students, Mohammad Ghassemi and Tuka Al-Hanai, are trying to get in on the trend of people wanting to connect over their electronic devices. They created an algorithm that connects students at MIT for friendly lunch dates to meet people all across campus that they likely wouldn’t meet otherwise.

They first started with a Google doc which they sent to the student body so that they could sign up for said lunch dates once a week for the semester. The form is essentially a survey that asks you questions to test your compatibility with another person. Both of the students had experience with the branch of Computer Science involving artificial intelligence and they developed an algorithm together for their project that they call ‘Maven’. The algorithm involves link analysis, which you can read about in one of my previous blogs, to analyze the links made between two people. The more connections, the higher chance of two people being matched together.

Many people at the University say that they enjoy this program as it allows them to make friends easier and to not have the fear that freshmen often feel of going to an event by themselves. The love of this program is shown as,“93 percent of participants said that they rate the program four or above”. Hopefully this can be brought to the University of Richmond to help students acclimate better to campus life.

References:

https://anniecoops.com/tag/connections/

https://www.eecs.mit.edu/news-events/media/algorithm-connects-students-most-interesting-person-theyve-never-met

Developments at MIT: Automated Screening for Childhood Communication Disorders

Children with speech and language disorders, especially under the age of six, often do not  have their disabilities caught early due to lack of identification of the issue from parents and teachers. If the disorders are not caught early in the child’d development, it can lead to academic and social anxiety as the children become older. It is a fact that 60% of kids go undiagnosed until after kindergarten which is an unnecessarily high number. MIT’s researchers at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are trying to reduce that percentage by generating a computer system that can automatically screen young children for speech and language disorders. The team of computer scientists have made steady progress but have not  yet completed their work. 

The system works by first analyzing audio recordings of children’s performances on standardized storytelling tests. The scientists plan on making the screening of the children speech completely automated and possibly making it accessible through phones and tablets for low-cost screening for large amounts of children. Two graduate students in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT used machine learning (which you can read about in one of my previous blog posts) to search through large sets of training data for patterns that correspond to particular classifications. The graduate students identified 13 acoustic features of children speech that their machine learning system could search and correlate to a specific disorder. The machine learning was trained on three different tasks: identifying any impairment, identifying language impairments and identifying speech impairments. 

There was an issue with considering age and gender as those both can affect how a child speaks. One of the graduate students used a statistical analysis mechanism called residual analysis to identify correlations between subjects age and gender and the features of their speech. The student then altered the correlations before she fed the data to the machine learning algorithm. This advancement could lead to more children having their speech disorders corrected before it becomes a large negative part of their lives.

References:

http://news.mit.edu/2016/automated-screening-childhood-communication-disorders-0922