Hmmm... I'm skeptical. Not necessarily because I don't think that pneumonia could be detected by testing VOCs in breath, but because I'm currently working on a project that uses sensors to do breath analysis and my amateur research has informed me that it's fairly hard to get right (which is why my primary goal is to identify deltas rather than achieve numerical accuracy).
For one, VOCs can be present in breath for other reasons besides some sort of infection in the lung, and VOCs are incredibly hard to differentiate with just a sensor. The fact that they tend to be faint in human breath even at their highest (in contrast to O2 and CO2) doesn't help. Even the most expensive PID sensors for VOCs (they get up into the several hundreds a pop) can't really tell you whether the predominant gas is acetone or alcohol or acetaldehyde or hydrogen sulfide. So you've got to figure out whether the presence of VOCs is truly an anomaly and not just a part of ketosis. In which case you will also need to measure at least VeO2 to see whether the VOCs correspond with the Respiratory Quotient.
The "e-nose" project, as described on the MakeZine article, doesn't appear to do that. It does have an alcohol sensor. But these sensors aren't particularly sophisticated. They use semiconductors with heating elements to detect the presence of gases, and there is almost certainly some overlap between the alcohol and VOCs sensors.
If VOCs are produced by pneumonia, then yes, it's conceivable that even just the VOCs sensor alone would detect this. But can this group of sensors used in the e-nose differentiate pneumonia from catabolism?
Maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After all, this thing uses AI. And maybe AI can recognize something that a human can't by simply looking at a line graph. I dunno... Such things should be tested against known inputs before being suggested to diagnose anything.
One good way to debunk this is to measure raw sensor output and compute Mutual Information (which incorporates sensor noise/variability). If the sensor only produces X bits of information, no algorithm will be able to extract more classes than that. In the SCIO case it was just under 8 bits total of information. So something like a poor color sensor. You could train on apples and oranges and maybe do an investor demo, but it's not actually going to do anything useful (as the Kickstarter crowd soon learned).
True, but there are things where AI can help. For example, in the domain of electronic gas sensors, AI can be used to disentangle confounding variables like gas, humidity and temperature. All three affect the sensor output in a nonlinear fashion, and an ANN can learn the transfer function that extracts the (almost) pure gas response.
Is the limit: A) sensor resolution, B) NN architecture and/or algorithm, C) training sample size, D) training data (labeling, segmentation) quality, or E) it doesn't sufficiently predict the variance with low enough error?
New NN models are able to do more with the exact same sensor data.
AI can extract information from a sensor that is 'obvious' when you look at it by eye, yet no easy combination of frequency filters and a carefully tuned threshold can extract reliably.
AI can detect more information in the whole dataset, because it for example has the whole "breath in- breath out" cycle in view. Fungi residing in the mouth would be present as background noise even during breathing in and out. But fungi-products existing at the end of a breath out cycle, are most likely to originate from the lungs, due to the mouth contamination being "flushed" out by the breath itself.
It looks like the principle is that a machine learning model trained on the combined output of four different kinds of gas sensors can discover correlations between unintentional characteristics of the sensors. For example, the manufacturer of an ethanol or nitrogen dioxide sensor is not going to specify anything about how it responds to vanillin, but it seems plausible to me that the relationship between their responses contains some hidden information that could help to discriminate between vanillin and eugenol. With enough different sensors, there's quite a bit of information to be found in mining their undefined behavior.
That is to say, you can treat the sensor reading as being completely meaningless and skip interpreting it as indicating VOC levels. You're just using the sensors as black boxes that produce arbitrary values with the property that exposure to organic vapor changes the output "somehow", and letting model training find some meaning in it.
> With enough different sensors, there's quite a bit of information to be found in mining their undefined behavior.
It sounds like you would need to be exceptionally careful that your meta-process didn't "find" some signal in pure noise (via re-using test sets and so on).
He was specifically looking to identify fungal pneumonia not just any old kind of pneumonia.
The linked Wikipedia article indicates mortality in immunocompromised patients can be as high as 90 percent. That sentence fits with my general impression that fungal pneumonia is both real serious shit and also typically found in people with advanced cases of other serious medical problems, like AIDS or cystic fibrosis.
It sounds reasonably plausible to me that it's feasible to detect fungal pneumonia in specific this way with some reasonable confidence level.
From working on the environmental sensor side of things, I'd concur. The VOCs will be able to be picked up, but the cross talk will be huge across other VOCs that don't themselves indicate pneumonia. There isn't one VOC, there's thousands. False positives are written all over this. This is the very same approach Theranos went. On a science level, sure, technically possible maybe. You'll even get boolean outputs. But on an engineering and regulatory level, you're in for a world of pain without the spectral tech that is still 2-5 years away before this is worth basing human lives on.
This is what happens when you give children the tools to succeed by teaching them math and science in ways that directly relate to their world view. Obviously, this kid is very bright, but giving kids the tools to understand how the ideas they're learning can be applied in the real world is so satisfying. They aren't blinded by previous failures, or the current market, or what can and can't be done.
Sometimes you give the children these tools and they decide to do something they are more interested in. It is important to realize that not all children are interested in sciences.
Of course, no one should be forced to make things. But a lot of kids are naturally curious and can look at things in ways that are not obvious to adults.
That said, every single kid who I knew growing up who had access to these sorts of opportunities but did something "more interesting" has ended up regretting it in adulthood. This probably isn't true across the board, but among the people I know it definitely is.
Maybe. It’s more like it’s what a kid’s parents do when kids can no longer be kids and are driven to start working on their college applications earlier and earlier.
There's more to making electronics than getting into MIT and prestigious universities. I think a lot of the users on HN like myself enjoy creating things just to create them. I don't need prestige or accolades; just build something, break it, fix it, take it apart. Some people enjoy learning how things work.
Does anybody have a link to what the kid actually did? I skimmed the video, looked at the diagram, read the original MAKE article, and it seems like the kid did a science project and it doesn't actually diagnose pneumonia. Am I missing something important?
The reason I'm asking is that I see a lot of these (used to judge science fairs, worked with smart undergraduates who build their own equipment) but most of it overstates the technical advances made by the kid.
My guess,
1 He found/was given an off the shelf fungal sensor designed to detect pneumonia
2 He hooked it up to a raspi
3 He trained a small tensorflow model to give true/false signals based on the input
All in all, not that bad of a little hack.
What I'm most disappointed by these science fare projects is that its often found that the parents of the child are top engineers in the specific field of the projects. In this case, perhaps his mom is a Sr Engineer at a company producing artificial noses aimed at detecting pneumonia where she is in charge of developing dev-kits and SDKs that happen to include sample tensor flow models.
What annoys me is that the story is often one of a kid, against all odds, learning all of this tech out of their own gumption. Where in the same science fare, there probably was a kid who had no help from their parents, who hacked together a 'are the lights on' circuit, using hand-me-down tech components, who's getting no notice.
> there probably was a kid who had no help from their parents, who hacked together a 'are the lights on' circuit, using hand-me-down tech components, who's getting no notice.
I'd have struggled to articulate what annoys me about stories like this, but this absolutely hits the nail on the head. I went to a school in the City of London with very elite investment-banker-parents demographics, and I can't tell you the number of stories like this. One comes to mind where one kid won a contest for designing a stockpicking algorithm, and it turned out - of course - that his mum was a fund manager at Goldman, specialising in that exact same area. I don't know what the point of it is. Is there not more to life than gaming university applications?
The MC knows what the crowd wants to see. If there is some contest, they will make sure the most attractive person wins. This is what the crowd wants, and the losers have no reasonable basis to protest and if they do they'll be (falsely) accused of being poor sports. Most attractive people don't know what's really happening, and assume their win is real.
The thing is, I get it. There's a wholesome excitement around the idea of discovery and you want to do your part and not be a wet blanket. And it's a white lie that is good for society - if not for the ego of the hero. You want there to be a new discovery, that came out of nowhere, because that's the better story. It's the kind of Myth that a good society runs on, and needs, even if it's false, because the real out-of-nowhere discovery stories happen too infrequently to be of use.
The best thing to do, really, is to give the kid a medal, and shut up about it not being real, and hope to high heaven he isn't misled by the easy victory.
Best science fair I ever saw was at a remote construction site near Qinshan, China in 1999. Many Canadian engineers lived on a camp by the site, building two nuclear reactors [1]. The camp also had a school for the engineer's children, literally one room with a teacher and about twenty children from grade 1 to grade 8 [2]. It was a good school, the teacher excellent and the kids clearly loving it. The older kids got a lot out of helping the younger ones. There was excellent quality recent school work in evidence on the walls. Though I did occasionally pop by the school when I'd visit the site, I usually didn't.
On one of my site visits I was asked if I wanted a detour from the project site to check out the school science fair. I later figured out that the minor scheduling difficulties I had around that particular visit was so that I'd be there on the day of the science fair.
Every student had a project. There were a few of the usual suspects, like the baking soda volcano and potato battery. However, those were the exception. Most of the projects were astounding, well beyond what I'd seen as an engineering undergrad in university.
The kids, standing proudly in front of their project and the bristol board explanations, knew very well how to explain the project and had a deep understanding of how it had come together. They'd definitely done the work and were justifiably proud.
That said, the majority of the projects were such that they could only have been the product of many evenings and weekends over months of father[3]/child working together. I'll assume that work on the next science fair would have begun the day after the science fair I saw wrapped up.
2. High school was a boarding school back in Canada.
3. I'm pretty sure that all the engineers were male, for I'd be remembering a female engineer, but the school kids were a balance mix of boys and girls.
No that’s the point - there wasn’t evidence that any of 1, 2, or 3 was ever done. Some mime guy puts together a gas sensor and tinyml setup - the kid makes some report on the hypothetical ability to use to diagnose fungal pneumonia in reference to some papers in the literature, but I don’t see actual evidence of an actual experiment.
We ran into this in Cubscouts with pinewood derby...the solution we had was a build day where the kids could go from raw block to finished car with our help and tools (belt sander with used up belt, parent or leader running the scrollsaw for the younger kids...paint at the Cubmaster's house and the parent doesn't have to worry about spraypaint)
Then to get past the 'parents doing all the building' we ran an outlaw class where the siblings and parents could compete...but it's the same kind of dynamic.
I don't immediately see the issue with the parent helping a child with tech they're familiar with...helping my son 3d print and sell fidget spinners had lots of little life lessons wrapped up in it.
One contest I'm aware of accidentally had the organizers kid win the contest. Who would have thought it possible? I feel really bad for the one that actually deserved to win.
Does anyone else approach these "teen invents x" or "wiz kid middle schooler discovers y" articles with extreme skepticism? About half the time the invention turns out to be bogus or trivial, and in the other half it comes to light the parents were behind it.
I, for one, am one of those people. However, after watching a few minutes of the linked video, I'm convinced (and pleasantly surprised) that Caleb has firm grasp on his design, and honestly sounds like he was the driving force behind his own particular implementation.
If you watch the video it's very apparent that the kid deeply knows how everything works. If he did not make this entire (very impressive) project himself, he certainly could have. He understands how chemicals interact with the various gas sensors (used limonene, pine and seed oils as test substances), how the model works, how to grow fungus in a sterile environment to get training data, how to get an API together to service the device...
I agree, these clickbait articles are rarely honest and most of them reek of parents trying to turn their children into (internet) celebreties.
Also I noticed that they typically employ a very common pattern in which the headline makes a truly big claim (e.g. "10 year old invents cheap way to purify any water source"), then afterwards it turns out that this claim is far from accurate (e.g. the child did not invent it himself, had massive help and while the solution technically works it is in not feasible at all in the way the headline suggests).
Once it is noticed that the claim is false in the way it is presented the article then gets defended by pointing out that a child that young coming into contact with such a project is still impressive, which is again technically true but ultimately comes off as a dishonest deflection.
The international science fair is a good example. I grew up with a couple of people who would participate every year, and every year it was obvious from their academics and being in the same classrooms and social circles as them that they didn't come up with this stuff. Their projects were gigantic, expertly researched, and featured technology that no high school student in the pre-internet age would have been able to source or use independently. One of them had a single mother with a PhD in the field, the other had a science teacher mother and a father with an MS in biomedical engineering... in the same field.
Yeah it's usually "adult who knows how to do a thing presents kid with all of the pieces and guidance to make it happen". Which is great, you should do that for kids, but the articles about it usually make one cringe.
Yup. There's very little drawback to just disregarding any article which highlights a person's youth and their amazing accomplishments. Same reason to avoid "30 under 30" type articles as well. You're playing the game those people want you to play by ingesting those articles, and I see no need to engage myself in other people's "grinding".
Yes, seems like people really want to believe stories of teenagers suddenly making breakthrough discoveries. In this case it's probably having some sensors with data, throwing them into a neural network and getting good results on a training set. The question is, does it work at all on real world data...
I think the important part is to understand that the primary goal here is not to advance science. We have lots of adult scientists with better education, time, equipment doing that.
It's to improve the pipeline of kids excited to go into science by making science accessible, rewarding, and prestigious.
I mean this is a cool application, but not original idea. Gas/particulate sensors are used in ag to detect fungal spore concentration zones for spot treatment by looking for a specific particle size using the laser in the sensor. The worst part about these type articles is that they don't even cover the design usually so you can't tell if it's a novel idea or not. This one features hand drawn diagram with some incubator system, I guess it's for training purposes but idk. Mostly it seems like this is an advertorial for Microsoft AI.
Cool. And, I have a 13-year and she is still, literally, crying over spilt milk, hacked Roblox merchandize, how done the steak is, why her monitor is tilted wrong, and why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router.
> and why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router.
Basic sysops rule: either create redundancy (which is hard to do in a consumer space outside of Mac Pro machines as 99.99% of laptops carry only a single LAN port and in towers, about 3/4) or warn your users before doing maintenance.
Well, I do have backups. This is India, so I even have a backup for the backup. I have three ISPs load-balanced, and not experienced any downtime since the beginning of the Pandemic (early 2020). I do realize them going down but we never realize until I looked them up.
It runs almost all the time, but sometimes I need to update settings, etc. which needs reboots the load balancer that distributes everything from.
My son, now a sophomore at UCSC, definitely gave me a few moments of "Uhh... I really hope my kid isn't an idiot" at that age. Living in Silicon Valley, he had friends creating crazy Gary's Mod levels using Python (this was a decade ago) that they collaborated on using GitHub. I was shocked at how sophisticated junior high coders could get! My son, however, is not a techie and like his father, has always been a little immature for his age. I was like, "Why is my kid the only one who isn't a genius!?!"
It all turned out well and now he's happily studying economics (yeah, my apple didn't land anywhere near the tree). Everyone matures at their own pace, and computers, as I'm sure all of us know from our own history as geeks, are easy to impress people with. If you're really into biology, animals, astronomy, etc. what can you show people to wow them? Not much that hasn't been seen before. But any 13 yo can download and learn how to use the latest professional CAD software, the same IDEs pros use to make AAA games, or the same backend AI services used by major companies. And they are encouraged to do so! I can't imagine there's a lot of "Learn CRISPR at home!" tutorials out there. That makes a big difference.
a high end high school will have a biology teacher who can teach high school students to do crispr (crispr is quite easy).
My path into biology was looking into a microscope and seeing a world of non-computer state machines that behaved like cellular automata. and then my path led back to computers because real biology is much harder than CS.
And I think some kids get into astronomy if I demo my telescope showing them planets and stars. But I don't really push kids too hard in one or another direction; my parents thought I should learn german so I could excel at organic chemistry
Is the headline being a straight-up lie a valid reason for flagging? The kid did not diagnose pneumonia. He came up with an idea for a design that might hypothetically detect pneumonia.
Unfortunately there is no other way to signal trash submissions. "Not upvoting" is not really a sufficient signal when enough people get baited by the headline.
I agree, but I highly suspect that if you flag a lot of submissions that aren't also flagged by others you end up on some kind of list where your flags are ignored or deprioritized.
I've mentioned this elsewhere but I think Hacker News needs people who are vetted users who can flag these articles with specific bits, such as "this is clickbait that oversells what happened here", or "this is an unnecessarily partisan analysis of COVID policy outcomes". That signal is much more important to me than "this post was flagged because people don't like emacs"
The main invention is in the electronic nose. The kid just did the plumbing of connecting it to some ML library.
Of course, the electronic nose itself is a work of plumbing too, where some existing gas sensors are put on a pcb.
In short, nothing seems really new here, but the application is interesting. I guess it's always interesting when people start looking for correlations in data and get some positive results, so from that point of view it is noteworthy.
The sensor (the four gas sensors on the board) was created by a third person.
The artificial nose is the TinyML model which trains on the sensor data (CO, NO2, ethanol, VOCs) to detect arbitrary scents by their signatures in those four categories.
The fungal pneumonia detector wires up a whole API with azure etc. and trains the model specifically to recognize pneumonia, based on an actual science experiment which grew and measured the fungus in artificial lungs.
As far as I'm concerned, both Caleb and Benjamin had brilliant ideas, executed them fantastically, and created something that may be truly useful. A $40 sensor that can detect disease just by breathing on it is more of a tangible contribution to humanity than many software engineers make in their life and almost certainly more than 99% of us did before the age of 14.
It is great that the kid is involved and interested in these technologies. Whether it works is another issue. You are going to need metrics such a LODs, LOQs, sensitivity and specificity to determine if this beats the gold standard tests.
I think the news is less "13 year old revolutionized medicine" and more "13 year old used ingenuity to create cool thing". Or at least, that's how I think it should be read. Focusing too much on the end result is likely not the best outcome because, while its a working prototype, many interesting prototypes never make it to fully end user capable system and there are a lot of hurdles to overcome to get it there.
But that doesn't take away from the fact that its a cool project and the kid did a great job in coming up with it and executing on it! Its definitely far beyond what most people achieve, nevermind 13 year olds.
This is a story about inspiration and achievement. Objective facts are less important than the message, IMO, especially after decades of "try-hard" being ridiculed in the U.S.
No, the author designed the ML training project also. The last section of the Make article is how to send the data to Edge Impulse and configure the ML training [0].
Mentioning Microsoft Azure IoT Central in the article and the video is odd, because you definitely don't need that to complete this project. It seems to be a feature that the Microsoft employee added to the GitHub project their self [1].
Caleb mentioned in the video that a co-worker of his aunt authored the research paper about detecting bacterial pneumonia from VOC levels. Everything else feels like a Microsoft marketing hype train that went off the rails.
The vast majority of work is plumbing, but there are still new things.
What matters isn't making new things, it's making new things that work, and bringing them all the way to completion.
The vast majority of innovation isn't exciting discovery, it's coming up with tests to convince yourself you actually did what you thought you did and sharing those results with regulators. That's the difference between Theranos and GRAIL.
I just built a tardigrade detector neural network; nobody has done that exact thing before, and now i'm talking to the world's leading tardigrade researcher because my tool might be helpful in answering an unanswered important tardigrade question.
But thousands if not millions of individuals worked over hundreds to thousands of years to bring us that tardigrade detector; all I did was take advantage of that to label 100 images! I've tried being an ML researcher; my conclusion is the best models are distilled from postdoc tears, and we merely retrain those models without pain.
I am not skeptical of the kid being able to do this. Good for them! I'm sure they will grow up to be an inquisitive and brilliant member of society.
However, like many, I feel like this article could be papering over... something.
OK I'll just say it: Privilege.
And hey! Not every kid with privilege ends up being brilliant! And he may not be privileged! But it is a lot easier to succeed when you have it.
And my problem with this article is this: We are constantly papering over how much of a difference a good education can make, and how little opportunity to get that quality of education there is in the United States.
You often see people bemoaning their lot in life: "Ugh. When Mark Zuckerburg/Bill Gates/insert CEO was my age, they already started Microsoft!"
And my reply to this sentiment is this: How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did your parents spend on your pre-university education? I'm willing to bet it wasn't in the hundreds of thousands.
I see this kid is from LA. Sometimes all it takes is being in the right zip code to have access to... science fairs? My school didn't even have AP classes! I thought science fairs were something that only happened on TV.
I realize this is a bit petty, and it 100% comes from my childhood where I went to a poor rural school where I was a poor student, and so-fucking-desperately wanted more, and then moved to the city, and succeeded, flourished once I got access to a better quality of education. But pretending it isn't there feels dishonest.
It feels like an onion article headline: "Kid with everything going for him, despite all odds, tremendously succeeds"
I say good on the parents for putting their resources to good use. A lot of them squander it away on spoiled kids, waiting for the kids to show interest in anything useful. Yes, it would be great for society if all kids have these benefits, but we will only get there when people understand that this is something worthwhile.
It is, and very American-centric. Plenty of innovative people are born in poorer countries with much less resources at their disposal. Indeed quite a lot of American top scientists are immigrants from not exactly rich places.
Of course, even they are sort-of privileged by the fact that they weren't born blind, on in a period of outright war, or didn't get cancer at the age of three. But this is already stretching the meaning of "privilege".
Katalin Karikó, one of the main brains behind mRNA, grew up in shabby Communist Hungary and her lab equipment at her home university was likely worse than what a median high school in the U.S. has at its disposal. (There wasn't much convertible currency east of the Iron Curtain to buy top stuff, and not enough capacity to manufacture it locally.)
Sure, there are geniuses that can spawn out of anywhere that occasionally rise out of bad situations. They are notable because they are EXCEPTIONS to the rule.
But there is massive inequality and poverty in the United States. Here is an example: In my home town, the poverty rate is 12%-13%. In the US state of Georgia it is 17%. In the Czech Republic, which has about the same population as Georgia, it is 10%.
So your assertion that "her lab equipment at her home university was likely worse than what a median high school in the U.S." is questionable. There are plenty of people living in horrible conditions in the US. Our scores in mathematics are 30th amongst developed nations.
Our cities are full-to-the-brim with a homeless population that we have abandoned to the streets that our cities and citizens do not have the wealth to address due to all of the money going to 1% of the population. In fact, our homeless population is almost to 0.2% of the total population, coming in at around 500k people.
Also, the assertion "other people have it worse" is not useful. I can be critical of our current society and also realize I have a privilege living where I do. I can see the impoverished system I grew up in, compare it to the opportunities afforded other people, and say: "Hmm. Maybe we can improve society somewhat."
Readit News
For one, VOCs can be present in breath for other reasons besides some sort of infection in the lung, and VOCs are incredibly hard to differentiate with just a sensor. The fact that they tend to be faint in human breath even at their highest (in contrast to O2 and CO2) doesn't help. Even the most expensive PID sensors for VOCs (they get up into the several hundreds a pop) can't really tell you whether the predominant gas is acetone or alcohol or acetaldehyde or hydrogen sulfide. So you've got to figure out whether the presence of VOCs is truly an anomaly and not just a part of ketosis. In which case you will also need to measure at least VeO2 to see whether the VOCs correspond with the Respiratory Quotient.
The "e-nose" project, as described on the MakeZine article, doesn't appear to do that. It does have an alcohol sensor. But these sensors aren't particularly sophisticated. They use semiconductors with heating elements to detect the presence of gases, and there is almost certainly some overlap between the alcohol and VOCs sensors.
If VOCs are produced by pneumonia, then yes, it's conceivable that even just the VOCs sensor alone would detect this. But can this group of sensors used in the e-nose differentiate pneumonia from catabolism?
Maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After all, this thing uses AI. And maybe AI can recognize something that a human can't by simply looking at a line graph. I dunno... Such things should be tested against known inputs before being suggested to diagnose anything.
An example is the SCIO sensor ( https://nocamels.com/2019/03/scio-kickstarter-darling-promis... ) which was a cheap handheld spectrometer that claimed to accurately determine the nutritional information of any food you pointed it at.
One good way to debunk this is to measure raw sensor output and compute Mutual Information (which incorporates sensor noise/variability). If the sensor only produces X bits of information, no algorithm will be able to extract more classes than that. In the SCIO case it was just under 8 bits total of information. So something like a poor color sensor. You could train on apples and oranges and maybe do an investor demo, but it's not actually going to do anything useful (as the Kickstarter crowd soon learned).
New NN models are able to do more with the exact same sensor data.
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That is to say, you can treat the sensor reading as being completely meaningless and skip interpreting it as indicating VOC levels. You're just using the sensors as black boxes that produce arbitrary values with the property that exposure to organic vapor changes the output "somehow", and letting model training find some meaning in it.
It sounds like you would need to be exceptionally careful that your meta-process didn't "find" some signal in pure noise (via re-using test sets and so on).
The linked Wikipedia article indicates mortality in immunocompromised patients can be as high as 90 percent. That sentence fits with my general impression that fungal pneumonia is both real serious shit and also typically found in people with advanced cases of other serious medical problems, like AIDS or cystic fibrosis.
It sounds reasonably plausible to me that it's feasible to detect fungal pneumonia in specific this way with some reasonable confidence level.
It also detects alcohol from drinking a couple of beers as a dangerous increase in formaldehyde...
There’s more to life than getting into MIT.
On the other hand, if the kid is 'coached' to look/identify, as you say, it is a sad state of affairs when kids are pushed into adulthood too soon...
We have seen this for more than a decade also with the marketing practices around sexualization of fashion for younger and younger kids...
The reason I'm asking is that I see a lot of these (used to judge science fairs, worked with smart undergraduates who build their own equipment) but most of it overstates the technical advances made by the kid.
All in all, not that bad of a little hack.
What I'm most disappointed by these science fare projects is that its often found that the parents of the child are top engineers in the specific field of the projects. In this case, perhaps his mom is a Sr Engineer at a company producing artificial noses aimed at detecting pneumonia where she is in charge of developing dev-kits and SDKs that happen to include sample tensor flow models.
What annoys me is that the story is often one of a kid, against all odds, learning all of this tech out of their own gumption. Where in the same science fare, there probably was a kid who had no help from their parents, who hacked together a 'are the lights on' circuit, using hand-me-down tech components, who's getting no notice.
I'd have struggled to articulate what annoys me about stories like this, but this absolutely hits the nail on the head. I went to a school in the City of London with very elite investment-banker-parents demographics, and I can't tell you the number of stories like this. One comes to mind where one kid won a contest for designing a stockpicking algorithm, and it turned out - of course - that his mum was a fund manager at Goldman, specialising in that exact same area. I don't know what the point of it is. Is there not more to life than gaming university applications?
The thing is, I get it. There's a wholesome excitement around the idea of discovery and you want to do your part and not be a wet blanket. And it's a white lie that is good for society - if not for the ego of the hero. You want there to be a new discovery, that came out of nowhere, because that's the better story. It's the kind of Myth that a good society runs on, and needs, even if it's false, because the real out-of-nowhere discovery stories happen too infrequently to be of use.
The best thing to do, really, is to give the kid a medal, and shut up about it not being real, and hope to high heaven he isn't misled by the easy victory.
On one of my site visits I was asked if I wanted a detour from the project site to check out the school science fair. I later figured out that the minor scheduling difficulties I had around that particular visit was so that I'd be there on the day of the science fair.
Every student had a project. There were a few of the usual suspects, like the baking soda volcano and potato battery. However, those were the exception. Most of the projects were astounding, well beyond what I'd seen as an engineering undergrad in university.
The kids, standing proudly in front of their project and the bristol board explanations, knew very well how to explain the project and had a deep understanding of how it had come together. They'd definitely done the work and were justifiably proud.
That said, the majority of the projects were such that they could only have been the product of many evenings and weekends over months of father[3]/child working together. I'll assume that work on the next science fair would have begun the day after the science fair I saw wrapped up.
1. Qinshan III, units 1 and 2; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinshan_Nuclear_Power_Plant.
2. High school was a boarding school back in Canada.
3. I'm pretty sure that all the engineers were male, for I'd be remembering a female engineer, but the school kids were a balance mix of boys and girls.
Then to get past the 'parents doing all the building' we ran an outlaw class where the siblings and parents could compete...but it's the same kind of dynamic.
I don't immediately see the issue with the parent helping a child with tech they're familiar with...helping my son 3d print and sell fidget spinners had lots of little life lessons wrapped up in it.
Also I noticed that they typically employ a very common pattern in which the headline makes a truly big claim (e.g. "10 year old invents cheap way to purify any water source"), then afterwards it turns out that this claim is far from accurate (e.g. the child did not invent it himself, had massive help and while the solution technically works it is in not feasible at all in the way the headline suggests).
Once it is noticed that the claim is false in the way it is presented the article then gets defended by pointing out that a child that young coming into contact with such a project is still impressive, which is again technically true but ultimately comes off as a dishonest deflection.
Sometimes very bogus, even totally fake
example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otjvUz7qKXc ('free energy' device, "invented" by a kid, debunked by electroboom)
It's to improve the pipeline of kids excited to go into science by making science accessible, rewarding, and prestigious.
His vocabulary rivals that of a 20 year old software engineer. It's pretty impressive.
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I’m with her on this one. Not announcing the outage before it happens is kinda disrespectful.
That's the 2020 equivalent of your parents picking up the phone while you're online on dialup.
I’d be pissed too. You don’t mess with the router without warning people using it ;)
Basic sysops rule: either create redundancy (which is hard to do in a consumer space outside of Mac Pro machines as 99.99% of laptops carry only a single LAN port and in towers, about 3/4) or warn your users before doing maintenance.
It runs almost all the time, but sometimes I need to update settings, etc. which needs reboots the load balancer that distributes everything from.
:-)
It all turned out well and now he's happily studying economics (yeah, my apple didn't land anywhere near the tree). Everyone matures at their own pace, and computers, as I'm sure all of us know from our own history as geeks, are easy to impress people with. If you're really into biology, animals, astronomy, etc. what can you show people to wow them? Not much that hasn't been seen before. But any 13 yo can download and learn how to use the latest professional CAD software, the same IDEs pros use to make AAA games, or the same backend AI services used by major companies. And they are encouraged to do so! I can't imagine there's a lot of "Learn CRISPR at home!" tutorials out there. That makes a big difference.
My path into biology was looking into a microscope and seeing a world of non-computer state machines that behaved like cellular automata. and then my path led back to computers because real biology is much harder than CS.
And I think some kids get into astronomy if I demo my telescope showing them planets and stars. But I don't really push kids too hard in one or another direction; my parents thought I should learn german so I could excel at organic chemistry
go slugs
Harboring resentment for your teenager for being moody is like the frog and the scorpion. it is in their nature!
Not to say isn't maddening, mind you.
Of course, the electronic nose itself is a work of plumbing too, where some existing gas sensors are put on a pcb.
In short, nothing seems really new here, but the application is interesting. I guess it's always interesting when people start looking for correlations in data and get some positive results, so from that point of view it is noteworthy.
The artificial nose is the TinyML model which trains on the sensor data (CO, NO2, ethanol, VOCs) to detect arbitrary scents by their signatures in those four categories.
The fungal pneumonia detector wires up a whole API with azure etc. and trains the model specifically to recognize pneumonia, based on an actual science experiment which grew and measured the fungus in artificial lungs.
As far as I'm concerned, both Caleb and Benjamin had brilliant ideas, executed them fantastically, and created something that may be truly useful. A $40 sensor that can detect disease just by breathing on it is more of a tangible contribution to humanity than many software engineers make in their life and almost certainly more than 99% of us did before the age of 14.
The innovation is in the data, not in the ML.
But that doesn't take away from the fact that its a cool project and the kid did a great job in coming up with it and executing on it! Its definitely far beyond what most people achieve, nevermind 13 year olds.
Mentioning Microsoft Azure IoT Central in the article and the video is odd, because you definitely don't need that to complete this project. It seems to be a feature that the Microsoft employee added to the GitHub project their self [1].
Caleb mentioned in the video that a co-worker of his aunt authored the research paper about detecting bacterial pneumonia from VOC levels. Everything else feels like a Microsoft marketing hype train that went off the rails.
[0]: https://makezine.com/projects/second-sense-build-an-ai-smart...
[1]: https://github.com/kartben/artificial-nose/blob/master/firmw...
What matters isn't making new things, it's making new things that work, and bringing them all the way to completion.
The vast majority of innovation isn't exciting discovery, it's coming up with tests to convince yourself you actually did what you thought you did and sharing those results with regulators. That's the difference between Theranos and GRAIL.
I just built a tardigrade detector neural network; nobody has done that exact thing before, and now i'm talking to the world's leading tardigrade researcher because my tool might be helpful in answering an unanswered important tardigrade question.
But thousands if not millions of individuals worked over hundreds to thousands of years to bring us that tardigrade detector; all I did was take advantage of that to label 100 images! I've tried being an ML researcher; my conclusion is the best models are distilled from postdoc tears, and we merely retrain those models without pain.
However, like many, I feel like this article could be papering over... something.
OK I'll just say it: Privilege.
And hey! Not every kid with privilege ends up being brilliant! And he may not be privileged! But it is a lot easier to succeed when you have it.
And my problem with this article is this: We are constantly papering over how much of a difference a good education can make, and how little opportunity to get that quality of education there is in the United States.
You often see people bemoaning their lot in life: "Ugh. When Mark Zuckerburg/Bill Gates/insert CEO was my age, they already started Microsoft!"
And my reply to this sentiment is this: How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did your parents spend on your pre-university education? I'm willing to bet it wasn't in the hundreds of thousands.
I see this kid is from LA. Sometimes all it takes is being in the right zip code to have access to... science fairs? My school didn't even have AP classes! I thought science fairs were something that only happened on TV.
I realize this is a bit petty, and it 100% comes from my childhood where I went to a poor rural school where I was a poor student, and so-fucking-desperately wanted more, and then moved to the city, and succeeded, flourished once I got access to a better quality of education. But pretending it isn't there feels dishonest.
It feels like an onion article headline: "Kid with everything going for him, despite all odds, tremendously succeeds"
Much better use of money than a super-car or many other options. Not that I have any right to say what people can do with their money.
It is, and very American-centric. Plenty of innovative people are born in poorer countries with much less resources at their disposal. Indeed quite a lot of American top scientists are immigrants from not exactly rich places.
Of course, even they are sort-of privileged by the fact that they weren't born blind, on in a period of outright war, or didn't get cancer at the age of three. But this is already stretching the meaning of "privilege".
Katalin Karikó, one of the main brains behind mRNA, grew up in shabby Communist Hungary and her lab equipment at her home university was likely worse than what a median high school in the U.S. has at its disposal. (There wasn't much convertible currency east of the Iron Curtain to buy top stuff, and not enough capacity to manufacture it locally.)
But there is massive inequality and poverty in the United States. Here is an example: In my home town, the poverty rate is 12%-13%. In the US state of Georgia it is 17%. In the Czech Republic, which has about the same population as Georgia, it is 10%.
So your assertion that "her lab equipment at her home university was likely worse than what a median high school in the U.S." is questionable. There are plenty of people living in horrible conditions in the US. Our scores in mathematics are 30th amongst developed nations.
Our cities are full-to-the-brim with a homeless population that we have abandoned to the streets that our cities and citizens do not have the wealth to address due to all of the money going to 1% of the population. In fact, our homeless population is almost to 0.2% of the total population, coming in at around 500k people.
Also, the assertion "other people have it worse" is not useful. I can be critical of our current society and also realize I have a privilege living where I do. I can see the impoverished system I grew up in, compare it to the opportunities afforded other people, and say: "Hmm. Maybe we can improve society somewhat."