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Using AI to decode speech from brain activity

Every year, more than 69 million people around the world suffer traumatic brain injury, which leaves many of them unable to communicate through speech, typing, or gestures. These people’s lives could dramatically improve if researchers developed a technology to decode language directly from noninvasive brain recordings. Today, we’re sharing research that takes a step toward this goal. We’ve developed an AI model that can decode speech from noninvasive recordings of brain activity.

From three seconds of brain activity, our results show that our model can decode the corresponding speech segments with up to 73 percent top-10 accuracy from a vocabulary of 793 words, i.e., a large portion of the words we typically use on a day-to-day basis.

Decoding speech from brain activity has been a long-standing goal of neuroscientists and clinicians, but most of the progress has relied on invasive brain-recording techniques, such as stereotactic electroencephalography and electrocorticography. These devices provide clearer signals than noninvasive methods but require neurosurgical interventions. While results from that work suggest that decoding speech from recordings of brain activity is feasible, decoding speech with noninvasive approaches would provide a safer, more scalable solution that could ultimately benefit many more people. This is very challenging, however, since noninvasive recordings are notoriously noisy and can greatly vary across recording sessions and individuals for a variety of reasons, including differences in each person’s brain and where the sensors are placed.

Meet China’s Cyber Dog — The Future Of Robotics

This post is also available in: he עברית (Hebrew)

China has developed the world’s largest electric-powered quadruped bionic robot, which is expected to join logistics delivery and reconnaissance missions in complex environments that have proven too challenging for human soldiers, including remote border regions and highly risky combat zones, analysts said.

In December, China announced that it would work to become a leading global player in robotics by 2025 under a five-year plan.

China’s new “sky train” floats under an elevated track, using magnets and AI

The 2,600-foot-long experimental rail is located in Southern China. A typical maglev train glides above its track, supported by magnetic repulsion and propelled by a linear motor. This one, however, moves underneath its track at a speed of 50 mph. It operates about 32 feet above the ground and makes no physical contact with the rail.

SEE: São Paulo subway ordered to suspend use of facial recognition

After some test runs, local authorities said the line could even increase to 4.7 miles and its top operational speed can reach 75 mph.

Existential Hope Special with Morgan Levine

Foresight Existential Hope Group.
Program & apply to join: https://foresight.org/existential-hope/

In the Existential Hope-podcast (https://www.existentialhope.com), we invite scientists to speak about long-termism. Each month, we drop a podcast episode where we interview a visionary scientist to discuss the science and technology that can accelerate humanity towards desirable outcomes.

Xhope Special with Foresight Fellow Morgan Levine.

Morgan Levine is a ladder-rank Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at the Yale School of Medicine and a member of both the Yale Combined Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and the Yale Center for Research on Aging. Her work relies on an interdisciplinary approach, integrating theories and methods from statistical genetics, computational biology, and mathematical demography to develop biomarkers of aging for humans and animal models using high-dimensional omics data. As PI or co-Investigator on multiple NIH-, Foundation-, and University-funded projects, she has extensive experience using systems-level and machine learning approaches to track epigenetic, transcriptomic, and proteomic changes with aging and incorporate.
this information to develop measures of risk stratification for major chronic diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Her work also involves development of systems-level outcome measures of aging, aimed at facilitating evaluation for geroprotective interventions.

Existential Hope.
A group of aligned minds who cooperate to build beautiful futures from a high-stakes time in human civilization by catalyzing knowledge around potential paths to get there and how to plug in.

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