if you can't view the video in the link from your location, it's on youtube too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHKopqVI_cw
78 karma · joined January 22, 2013
You can reach me at shariq.mobin@gmail.com
It's a big deal because untreated hearing loss is associated with social isolation & depression and while 37M people have hearing loss in the United States, only 8M use hearing aids. Hearing in noisy places is the biggest reason for lack of adoption.
We just got our behind-the-ear (BTE) hardware prototype running and already have several excited patients. Listen to an audio recording from it here[2]. We're currently working on a pilot study with a professor in San Francisco.
If you, or someone you know, is interested in participating in the pilot study let me know. And if you know interested investors, I'm happy to chat with them. I can be reached at shariq@audiofocus.io
[1] www.audiofocus.io
AudioFocus (YC S19) makes hearing aids that work in noisy places like bars. We use a combination of an in-house built auralization framework and deep learning models to accomplish this. Our prototype runs on the iPhone and we're looking for someone to built a hardware prototype and take it all the way to mass manufactured scale.
You have experience in:
- Low Power Architecture Design
- Wireless Audio Transmission (NFMi, 900Mhz, 2.4Ghz)
- Validation & Mass Manufacturing
and are a lifelong learner, have interest in ML processors, and have worked at Apple AirPods, a hearing aid company, Bose, Doppler Labs, or something similar.
Founded by me (UC Berkeley, BS-EECS, 2011; UC Berkeley, PhD-ML, 2019). Contact: shariq@audiofocus.io
“The notion that any risk assessment instrument can account for bias ignores the racial disparities in current and past policing practices.” There are abundant theoretical and empirical reasons to support this claim, since risk assessments are typically based on data of arrests, convictions, or incarcerations, all of which are poor proxies for individual behaviors or predispositions. The coalition continued, “Ultimately, risk-assessment tools create a feedback-loop of racial profiling, pre-trial detention and conviction. A person’s freedom should not be reduced to an algorithm.” By contrast, the Partnership’s statement focused on “minimum requirements for responsible deployment,” spanning such topics as “validity and data sampling bias, bias in statistical predictions; choice of the appropriate targets for prediction; human-computer interaction questions; user training; policy and governance; transparency and review; reproducibility, process, and recordkeeping; and post-deployment evaluation.”
Seem's like they're addressing superficially irresponsible AI deployment but ignoring some of the deeper, complex, ethical issues raised by technologies like facial recognition.
In my view, it's about trying to provide more 'equal opportunity' in this world where it's financially feasible. This seems like a case where it is more often that not. Again, for medium+ businesses.
Good to know
It's important to remember making websites more accessible often benefits everyone in some way. e.g. providing an alt text description for images on your website obviously benefits visually impaired users, but it also benefits people who can't afford high bandwidth or people who are moving through a remote area. In the Microsoft framework these three scenarios are called:
1) Permanent (Visually Impaired)
2) Temporary (Can't afford high bandwidth)
3) Situational (In a remote area)
There's good online resources for understanding these concepts [1,2,3].
Anyway, for companies as big as WinnDixie, with $10B in annual revenue, they should be designing their websites to be accessible by everyone. For small businesses it would be nice if website building providers like SquareSpace and Wix made this as easy as possible for their users.
[1] https://www.iweb.co.uk/2016/10/inclusive-design-why-our-webs...
"It’s challenging. I think they need to make it really clear this is part of their job. It’s common for people not to allow dogs in their car, just in general. On top of that, they employ a lot of people who don’t speak english and people from several cultures who would never have a dog in the car."
[1] https://dralegal.org/case/national-federation-of-the-blind-o...
For now it looks like it's going to be a behind-the-ear hearing aid. Maybe in 5-10 years it could fit in your ear canal.
Glad you're excited about it!
There are a lot of challenges with putting this in a hearing aid: low latency inference (10ms), small power budget, consistent performance, fault tolerance, etc. Still a fair amount of R&D to be done, but change is coming.
From a high level @foone is right, our eyes and visual system are nothing like a camera. Our visual system constructs an internal 3D model of the world, our “perception”, given observations in the form of the electrical activity in our photoreceptor (rod and cone) cells. It tries to do this in a way that balances energy use and accuracy of the model. This simple concept can actually be used to explain a lot things that may seem like ‘hacks’ as @foone put it. One example: Saying Saccades are a problem is misleading, they likely evolved to give us higher acuity (resolution) vision without having to pay the energy cost of a larger fovea [1, 2, 3]. They also likely allow us to see color more accurately outside of our fovea.
I also really don’t buy this time-shifting idea, although other neuroscientists would probably disagree. As @foone said our eyes are not cameras, our perception is our brain hallucinating an internal 3D model of the world. It knows what data to incorporate into the model and what not to, i.e. a blurry saccade is not a good representation of the world. If you want to read about how this can be framed with bayesian statistics you can read one of my favorite papers from my advisor [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade#Function
[2] Ratnam, Kavitha, et al. "Benefits of retinal image motion at the limits of spatial vision." Journal of vision 17.1 (2017): 30-30.
[3] Anderson, Alexander G., et al. "A neural model of high-acuity vision in the presence of fixational eye movements." 2016 50th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers. IEEE, 2016.
[4] Olshausen, Bruno A. "27. Perception as an Inference Problem." The cognitive neurosciences (2014): 295-304. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/bb00/42b5e48feff89a95182c63...
Federal research funding should be directed towards developing big, long-term ideas rather than short-term research tech companies can and do focus on.
The challenge will be how to fit a hearing aid without an audiologists help. This will be especially difficult for older people.
Hopefully it will bring down the price of hearing aids substantially though.
[1] https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/bipart...
FYI - The ear piercing shriek you heard was from poor feedback cancellation on the hearing aid. Hearing aids have a microphone and speaker so feedback is common and a nightmare.
Also, I'm the founder of AudioFocus (YC S19)
[1] http://www.hearingresearch.org/ross/hearing_loss/the_audiogr... [2] http://openaudio.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-need-for-dynamic-r...
That isn't true. In a pure MVCC world you could detect such issues, specifically that two trxs were opened and they both tried to update the same row. This would generate a conflict and one transaction could just get shot. Snapshot-isolation/MVCC describes this issue.
However what InnoDB/mysql and Clustrix actually do is use MVCC for read-write conflicts and two-phase-locking for write-write conflicts which trivially fixes your proposed problem.
As the post points out, weaker isolation levels allow for more concurrency which translates to more scalability, which is why we chose our isolation level.