Wednesday, April 19, 2017

"Facebook Wants to Help You Communicate Directly From Your Brain via Non-Invasive Sensors" (FB)

I once had a urologist tell me that sticking a camera up my urethra was the non-invasive approach.

Afterwards I felt I had maybe been on the wrong end of an "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" dissimulation.

Anyhoo, here's what's going on in the Zuckster's world, via ZDNet:

http://zdnet1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2017/04/19/6d489ebc-53f0-43f9-9cea-8b7af51fd774/resize/770xauto/b5b7e9b8a19f494a4f12d7d75e3cc2e4/dugan-2-f8-2017.png
Facebook shared plans to develop a non-invasive brain-speech interface that would create a system--via sensors--to enable people to communicate without speech. In a nutshell, you think and communicate silently.

Regina Dugan, head of Facebook's Building 8 research lab, acknowledged that these "silent speech interfaces" are "a few years away." Building 8 is taking on two projects:

Type with your brain. Facebook wants to develop a silent speech interface that provides the speed and flexibility of voice with the privacy of text. This system has a goal of typing 100 words per minute straight from the speech center in your brain. The approach would decode words that you've already decided to share.

The project will rely on non-invasive sensors shipped at scale. Sensors would measure brain activity without signal distortions. There are no imaging sensors that can measure this way today. Facebook has a team of more than 60 scientists, integrators and engineers working on the project. 
http://zdnet1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2017/04/19/70d38761-846e-4fb2-8cb8-916b5ad928bb/resize/770xauto/cdd9fc59cfe8de6b608535adcae94b7d/dugan-1-f8-2017.png
"How do I get all that information out of my brain and into the world? What are my choices? Speech is essentially a compression algorithm and a lossy one at that," said Dugan....MUCH MORE
All I can think of is "This looks like some horrible parody of a TED Talk."
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