Tech
How digital twins are helping people with motor neurone disease speak | Computer Weekly
An initiative by a UK-based charity, supported by technology companies and universities, has developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital twin that allows people with communications disabilities to speak in a natural way.
The technology, known as VoxAI, represents a step-change from the computer-assisted voice used by late physicist Stephen Hawking, one of the first well-known public figures with motor neurone disease (MND).
The Scott-Morgan Foundation was set up by its founder, roboticist Peter Scott-Morgan, to apply engineering principles to disability after he was diagnosed with MND.
A five-year project led by the trust has developed an AI-powered platform that is helping people with MND, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), to communicate in a natural way despite their disabilities.
It was developed by the foundation’s chief technologist, Bernard Muller, who is paralysed with MND and has learned to write code using eye-tracking technology.
The platform brings together AI technologies to create photo-realistic avatars that move in a natural way, with natural facial expressions, and can reproduce the voice of the person using it. It is able to listen to the conversation and offer disabled people a choice of three answers that they could select based on its understanding of the person.
One of the people testing the technology, Leah Stavenhagen, for example, worked as a consultant at McKinsey before she developed MND. The AI she uses has been trained on a book she wrote, along with 30 interviews in English and French.
LaVonne Roberts, CEO of the Scott-Morgan Foundation, told Computer Weekly that while people did not mind waiting to hear what Stephen Hawking had to say, delays in communication usually cause problems for both the speaker and the listener.
“When you have someone that is having to spell something out laboriously, they are fatiguing their eyes, which has been shown to further progression of MND, so we are trying to protect from that,” she said.
“The other thing that happens is people start giving much shorter answers because they don’t have the time to stay in a conversation,” added Roberts. “And, honestly, you end up with awkward pauses.”
The Scott-Morgan Foundation, which demonstrated the technology today at an AI Summit in New York, plans to make the software available free of charge, so that it can be used by as many people as possible. It will also offer a subscription version for more advanced features.
Many off-the-shelf computers and tablets now come with workable eye-tracking, and tracking devices provided by the NHS may also be able to use the technology, said Roberts.
“The idea was to democratise the technology by putting it on the web, giving the license keys, so that people have their voice back again,” she said.
More than 100 million people in the world who live with conditions that severely limit speech – including people recovering from a stroke, or living with cerebral palsy, a traumatic brain injury or non-verbal autism – could benefit from the technology.
The foundation plans to start a two-year trial of the platform, which will track some 20 participants using the technology, led by Mexican university Tecnológico de Monterrey, which will evaluate its impact.
It is also developing a simplified platform that could be used by people who do not have access to Wi-Fi.
Gil Perry, CEO of D-ID, which creates digital avatars for businesses, contributed to the project after the company helped a few people with MND/ALS in ways they found life-changing.
His company joined the project with the Scott-Morgan Foundation about two years ago, after meeting with Roberts. “I saw that LaVonne has the vision and can connect all the dots together, because she has a group of people who just sleep and dream that vision day and night,” said Perry.
The company has improved its technology so that it can create an avatar that shows facial expressions, even for someone whose condition means they are at an advanced stage of immobility.
Roberts said that one of the breakthrough moments came after a mother told the foundation that, although the technology was good, “You just didn’t capture my daughter’s smile”. That sparked work to make the avatars more lifelike. “I remember Erin’s mother crying when she saw Erin on a video, and she was like, ‘That’s her smile’,” she said. “And I knew we were onto something.”
Muller, who architected the platform, said that his avatar not only makes him visible, but also “present”. “When someone sees my avatar smile or shows concern, they are seeing me, not a disability,” he added. “That changes everything about how I connect with the world.”
Tech
The Best LED Skincare Deals I’ve Seen This Mother’s Day Are at Megelin
The red-light therapy market shows no signs of slowing down. According to Fortune Business Insights, the industry is projected to grow from $1.21 billion in 2026 to $1.76 billion by 2034. Riding that wave is Hong Kong-based Megelin, which is currently running its largest Mother’s Day sale yet, offering major discounts on most of its LED devices and select electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) tools.
I’ve been testing the Duo Lux Laser & LED Light Therapy Mask for the past two weeks as part of a six-week trial. While I’m still forming my final verdict, I already have some early thoughts (more on that below). In the meantime, check out the standout deals because some of these discounts might be too good to pass up while they’re live.
This Laser & LED Light Therapy Mask Is $270 Off
The Megelin Duo Lux Laser & LED Light Therapy Mask combines 660-nanometer (nm) and 1,064-nm lasers with a 660-nm LED light for a more intensive treatment. The brand claims it can help smooth wrinkles, soothe inflammation, reduce pigmentation, and minimize redness. After two weeks of testing, I haven’t noticed any visible changes in my skin just yet, though to its credit, I also haven’t experienced any irritation or adverse reactions.
My biggest issue was the initial unboxing experience: The mask had a strong chemical odor that reminded me of formaldehyde. For a device that sits against your face and doesn’t have a mouth opening, that’s not exactly reassuring. Wiping it down and letting it air out significantly reduced the smell, but it definitely made for a less-than-ideal first impression.
That said, the mask itself is extremely comfortable. The soft, flexible silicone contours well to the face, and the dual-strap design keeps it secure without feeling restrictive. Treatments are quick and easy to customize thanks to four different modes, all controlled through an attached remote. And because it’s cordless, you’re free to move around while using it.
At full price, it’s a steep investment compared to its competitors. But with the current $270 discount, it becomes a much more compelling option, especially given the added laser therapy component, which isn’t as common at this price point. I’ll continue testing through the full six-week period before sharing my final verdict, but if you’re tempted to take advantage of the sale now, Megelin does offer a 60-day money-back guarantee and a one-year warranty.
Tech
‘Orbs,’ ‘Saucers,’ and ‘Flashes’ on the Moon: Pentagon Drops New UFO Files
Trump first teased the release in February in a Truth Social post. The Pentagon coordinated the release in partnership with the White House, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the Energy Department, NASA, and the FBI. Many of the files in this new drop contain documents that are already publicly available. However, some versions of these known documents in the new files contain more pages, or fewer redactions, than previously released versions.
More than 60 percent of Americans believe that the government is concealing information about UAP, according to YouGov, while 40 percent think UAP are likely alien in origin, according to Gallup. Congress has held hearings into whether there’s been a decades-long program to recover “non-human” technologies, yet evidence remains elusive.
Courtesy of the US Department of Defense
“If it’s just more blobby photos or redacted documents that don’t have any details in them, it’s more of the same,” Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester who studies the search for alien life, says of the new files. “What we need are actual scientific results from the investigations that should have been done if the most extraordinary claims being made are true.”
The document drop follows a week of high-profile discussions of aliens, including Stephen Colbert’s interview with former President Barack Obama, released on Wednesday. Obama cast doubt on government cover-ups about aliens by joking that “some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with the alien and sent it to his girlfriend.”
Courtesy of the US Department of Defense
Members of the Artemis II crew also second-guessed the idea of a vast government-wide conspiracy to hide the discovery of extraterrestrial life in a discussion with The Daily this week.
“Do you realize that if we found alien life out there, and we came back and reported on it, NASA would never have a budget issue for the rest of eternity?” said Reid Weisman, the commander of Artemis II. “So trust me.”
Victor Glover, the astronaut who piloted the mission, added: “Why would we hide that from you?”
Tech
Nick Bostrom Has a Plan for Humanity’s ‘Big Retirement’
Philosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paper, where he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of “its universal death sentence.” That upbeat gamble is quite a leap from his previous dark musings on AI, which made him a doomer godfather. His 2014 book Superintelligence was an early examination of AI’s existential risk. One memorable thought experiment: An AI tasked with making paper clips winds up destroying humanity because all those resource-needy people are an impediment to paper clip production. His more recent book, Deep Utopia, reflects a shift in his focus. Bostrom, who leads Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, dwells on the “solved world” that comes if we get AI right.
STEVEN LEVY: Deep Utopia is more optimistic than your previous book. What changed for you?
NICK BOSTROM: I call myself a fretful optimist. I am very excited about the potential for radically improving human life and unlocking possibilities for our civilization. That’s consistent with the real possibility of things going wrong.
You wrote a paper with a striking argument: Since we’re all going to die anyway, the worst that can happen with AI is that we die sooner. But if AI works out, it might extend our lives, maybe indefinitely.
That paper explicitly looks at only one aspect of this. In any given academic paper, you can’t address life, the universe, and the meaning of everything. So let’s just look at this little issue and try to nail that down.
That isn’t a little issue.
I guess I’ve been irked by some of the arguments made by doomers who say that if you build AI, you’re going to kill me and my children and how dare you. Like the recent book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Even more probable is that if nobody builds it, everyone dies! That’s been the experience for the last several 100,000 years.
But in the doomer scenario everybody dies and there’s no more people being born. Big difference.
I have obviously been very concerned with that. But in this paper, I’m looking at a different question, which is, what would be best for the currently existing human population like you and me and our families and the people in Bangladesh? It does seem like our life expectancy would go up if we develop AI, even if it is quite risky.
In Deep Utopia you speculate that AI could create incredible abundance, so much that humanity might have a huge problem with finding purpose. I live in the United States. We’re a very rich country, but our government, ostensibly with support of the people, has policies that deny services to the poor and distribute rewards to the rich. I think that even if AI was able to provide abundance for everyone, we would not supply it to everyone.
You might be right. Deep Utopia takes as its starting point the postulation that everything goes extremely well. If we do a reasonably good job on governance, everybody gets a share. There is quite a deep philosophical question of what a good human life would look like under these ideal circumstances.
The meaning of life is something you hear a lot about in Woody Allen movies and maybe in the philosophers community. I’m worried more about the wherewithal to support oneself and get a stake in this abundance.
The book is not only about meaning. That’s one out of a bunch of different values that it considers. This could be a wonderful emancipation from the drudgery that humans have been subjected to. If you have to give up, say, half of your waking hours as an adult just to make ends meet, doing some work you don’t enjoy and that you don’t believe in, that’s a sad condition. Society is so used to it that we’ve invented all kinds of rationalizations around it. It’s like a partial form of slavery.
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