iPhone for hearing loss?

Apparently, now you can cure your hearing loss with a $9.99 gadget that works to turn your iPhone into a hearing aid according to this CNET article. Huh? Why is everyone with an acquired hearing loss then spending thousands of dollars to get state-of-the-art hearing aids? The article is ludicrous. Obviously what we have all missed was that a combo of a simple volume amplifier and an equalizer is enough to restore one's hearing to optimal levels. Ginger Labs claim that "For those with a hearing loss, soundAMP reawakens your sense of hearing; sounds comes to life and you hear better again." For some reason this excerpt reminds me of these bogus $5 "hearing aids" ads you see in the back pages of pop U.S. magazines.

SoundAMP offers a feature that repeats the last seconds of the recorded sound. For a person with acquired

hearing loss, this is actually a useless feature! Let me first note that repeating "recorded sounds" is not the same

as repeating speech/conversation (which is what the article says this feature does). "Pure tone" sounds are usually

no problem for people who use hearing aids; all you need to "perceive" these sounds is an amplifier and any

hearing aid can fit that bill. Speech is much more complex and presents a problem of a taller order. Deciphering

speech involves -beyond capacity for perceiving plain sensory input- recognition, processing and understanding,

all very different cognitive processes in the brain.

The article states: "According to the developers, SoundAMP improves your hearing quality in a variety of

environments, including lecture halls and noisy restaurants. Thus, it has the potential to help students as well as the

hearing-impaired." This quote is just as vague as they come!! How exactly are students and "the hearing impaired"

similar audiences? It just shows the author's blatant ignorance of the mechanics and complexities of hearing loss

and related hearing aid technology. For sure, if hearing loss could improve in as simple a manner as turning up the volume

in an iPhone, none of us would be spending so much money in buying *actual* hearing aids, nor would the government

bother with research into hearing loss, and related brain, speech and signal processing tech. Let's set the record

straight: simply amplifying the volume may help about 5-15% of people with acquired hearing loss. The same

people can actually perform a simple surgery which restores their (conductive) hearing loss into "normal" levels.

The majority of people with acquired hearing loss need much more than a $5 amplifier with equalizing and recording

options.

They need a state-of-the-art speech processor. Of course such a feature could potentially improve its usefulness

if it could repeat sounds after a (slight) frequency mapping procedure, where a shift is made around areas where

people have reduced sensitivity for certain frequencies. However, that's exactly what hearing aids are (supposed

to be) doing! At least in theory, they are programmed to tweak your auditory input to match your audiogram's levels.

However, both the audiogram and the 'tweaking' process have severe limitations. For instance, audiograms are not

exact science! And hearing aids, depending on their underlying digital or analog platform, may not allow you any type

or level of 'tweaking'. And of course even if you had the perfect hearing aid to match your individualized (perfectly

measured) audiogram, there is always the X-factor of how your brain works with all this. Some people are unable to

benefit by state-of-the-art hearing aids despite their best efforts.

Maybe an improvement could be seen in replaying the recorded sound after applying a noise filter for specific problem

frequencies, e.g. a white noise filter, or every freq > 5000 Hz? I would never trust a machine to provide any noise filters

for me, beyond when applied in the extremes of the sound band. Speech is so much more complex than that.

Current state-of-the-art hearing aids offer a number of programmable channels. Users can try and test any one of

those channels that functions as an automatic noise filter; such a channel adjusts environmental sounds and speech input

to the user's audiogram and decides which frequencies to filter out based on indications in your audiogram. For many

of the reasons I mentioned above, this is utterly useless! Real speech and real brains are multifaceted dynamic systems;

no tech has come to address that level of complexity yet.

In an older post of mine posted in this blog last summer, I complained how the new iPhone was not hearing aid

compatible like most popular cell phones are. iPhone doesn't come with a hearing aid compatibility standard, so

you have no way to tell how well it fares with the microphone and telecoil of a modern hearing aid.

Incidentally, if you're curious about the hearing-aid compatibility standards for various popular hearing aids, go

to Phonescoop Phone Finder and choose a weighted search showing all options, where you can search for phones with high hearing aid compatibility. Anything about M3/T3 is what most people with acquired hearing loss need (M4/T4 is the top score and most phone may not accommodate the same rates for both M(icrophone) and T(elecoil)). The telecoil switch is what offers elimination of background noise in modern hearing aids and it's very useful for speaking on the phone while in the middle of the street or some other public area. When you have your telecoil switch on, though, you lose the volume of the microphone so you usually need pretty good phone compatibility with both your hearing aid's microphone and telecoil. Without a hearing aid compatibility (HAC) standard, you cannot tell if your new phone will work with your hearing aid without interference. In terms of usability, inference is critical since it renders hearing aids useless and the phones by extension become anything but a nuisance to people with acquired hearing loss. For the hearing impaired, speech perception is near impossible with the aid picking up buzzing, humming of whining noise when the user is on the phone.

Although it's nice to see anything like an improvement of sound clarity on iPhone, this is still nowhere near what customers with acquired hearing loss need to see in order to use an iPhone for listening purposes (not just music but also for speech).

IJCNN2009: June 2009 Atlanta, GA

An interesting joint conference focusing on the application of neural networks and other computational intelligence methods in time series forecasting.

With an exceptionally rich program of Special Sessions, Tutorials, Plenary Talks, Panels, Workshops and Invited Speakers, it promises to be a huge 5-day neuro-fest. 

My favorite IJCNN2009 activity: the "neurophysiology lab tour" at Emory University.   

Porting old C++ code into Eclipse

What I've been up to: I recently resurrected my old C++ code (developed in MS Visual Studio). 

Since I no longer have that VC++ version on this machine, I quickly downloaded (for free) and installed the Express 2008 version.

The result was impressive in that my (6.yr.) old code now actually runs on Express (only "fix" were a few dll patches).

The idea of porting it to Eclipse was motivated by an old wish to re-write (and expand) this code using open source tools that run in various platforms (if not in Java).

We'll see how that goes. ;-)

Bloggy has a new Wordpress blog

Check it out and let me know what you think. 

The content won't be identical but how it will differentiate is a mystery at the moment. 

Eventually I suspect some clear differentiation will take place. Until then, watch out your favorite interface and let me know if you have a preference! 

Experienceon.com

ExperienceOn is Spanish start-up based in Barcelona, that is trying to top Google on the search front by offering what they call intelligent services. Is ExperienceOn just one more start-up that tries to replicate Google? I guess time will tell.

Make your browser your handy research and note-taking tool

I love zotero. It's a free online note-taking tool that right now works with the Mozilla Firefox browser. If you are a student or a researcher and do a lot of online work (who doesn't these days), give it a try. It keeps your online findings organized and in one place. It really makes your searches truly productive and ready to use. Here's a good summary of the Zotero functionality from the Zotero site:

Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).

I would really like to see a Chrome extension of Zotero! Here's hoping!

Chrome

Since Google announced its brand new browser last year, I stopped using Mozilla and turned exclusively to Chrome. I did have to get back to Mozilla to load some pages full of add-on's that Chrome does not yet support. And I even noticed a slight deterioration in the quality of the Chrome browser in the case of a few pages that I use daily.
Did Google abandoned Chrome? How hard is it to get it up-to-date with add-on's?
It's OK (and understandable) to want to market new products fast but let's not forget quality! Someone needs to finish off the work they started with launching Chrome.

Global Google search glitch today

What happened, you guys?
I quickly fixed the problem when I saw the screwed up http address field but, boy, was it scary to know that Google could ever get screwed up even for a few minutes!
I would really never expect Google to allow any human error as they call it to show.
Let's hope this will never happen again.
In a few of the boards I frequent, people who are clueless of basic web editing, linking processes and the potential of human error in every step along the road started talking about using anti-virus programs or different browsers or even different search engines (!).
I believe that glitch could have hurt Google just because most people are not tech savvy enough to realize how "superficial" an error that was and truly just an "accident". For most users, Google is (or has been until today) beyond human error.

Google and NLU

Page has said the following:

The ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.

 
Thank God he also admits that we're not there yet (although Google no doubt works hard toward this goal).
Natural language understanding (NLU) is so much more than a word for word "decoding" of the linguistic meaning. Understanding "exactly what [one] mean[s]" requires full-blown NLU (rather than simply NLP) techniques and approaches. Linguistic and pragmatic context for instance figure big in NLU. And so are some "usability" aspects of the query for instance the intentions of the querent, assumptions and underlying inferences.
The search engines of the future will allow for a query to actually organize matching knowledge they mine from the internet instead of simply match against some web text. So when you plug in a query like "what is the cost of buying a house in Costa Rica in 2009?", you will expect something more specific and on-point than a list of "relevant" documents.

Google v. Powerset v. Live Search

Unfortunately, Microsoft's Live Search engine did not do much better than Powerset for the same search string: 

LiveSearch results

PS: Click on the link to enlarge the snapshot. 

Google v. Powerset search (part III)

Here's a comparison of the two search engines on the search string "flight 1549".
Notice that there is a Wikipedia article about this term. FYI flight 1549 of USAir crashed yesterday over Hudson River luckily with no victims.
Since Powerset only works with wikipedia articles, I thought the term was a good testbed.

The results are pretty disappointing for Powerset. Google yielded the relevant news articles about the flight on the top of its first page. Powerset didn't yield any relevant article in the first page (or as far down as the 5th page; I wouldn't look anywhere deeper than that!):

Powerset results

Ironically, Google listed the "flight 1549" wikipedia article first in its search results effectively beating powerset in its own turf:

Google results

Powerset (part II)

So, Microsoft acquired Powerset.
Microsoft always strived to catch up with and eventually challenge Google's search prowess. The acquisition of Powerset is part of this plan.
Powerset have been working off their San Fransisco HQs on a different type of search engine. One that is promised to be "natural language driven".
Here's an example of what the Powerset search can do (according to Powerset):
Instead of searching for book children (ala Google), imagine being able to search for: book for children, book by children, and book about children.
According to Powerset, "there would not be any way for us to properly express the query "books by children" without using the natural language". In other words, a natural language driven search would facilitate the natural tendency of users to phrase their queries using natural language rather than a string of words. So at least from a usability point of view, Powerset search seems pretty well-justified.
But does it work as promised?
I ran a few searches along the lines of books by children on the Powerset search engine and I got results which are at best as mixed as those from Google.
Watch this space for an analysis.

Powerset now part of Microsoft

I think that's big news on many levels. More on this later...

Speaking of Machine Translation...

Have you noticed how no online MT tool (I tried online Systran, Google and Babelfish) is capable of translating transliterated Greek into English?
Given how popular transliteration is for languages with their own "exotic" alphabets, I believe this is an avenue worthy of further exploration.

Machine Translation or CAT?

Asking whether machine translation (MT) or computer-aided translation (CAT) works better is pretty much a version of the chicken or the egg question in the translation circles.

In Machine Translation, (usually rule-based) software translates text from one language to another, and the human translator acts as an editor who corrects and/or customizes the process to meet specific project/data/customer requirements.

CAT tools work like a dictionary or taxonomy of sorts that save human-generated translations and keep them easily accessible, organized and consistent.
CAT-Translated text segments are stored in special files called Translation Memories (TM), which are then used as a basis for new translations.

The former relies on NLP and corpus linguistics algorithms and heuristics for the translation of text from one language to another. The latter relies on human translation and capitalizes on storage and editing post-processes.

Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages.
In fact I believe that an "ideal" solution would involve a successful merge of both methodologies. MT methods seem to scale better and CAT methods seem to fare better in terms of precision.