Thursday, March 30, 2006
Device warns you if you're boring or irritating
A DEVICE that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed.
One of the problems facing people with autism is an inability to pick up on social cues. Failure to notice that they are boring or confusing their listeners can be particularly damaging, says Rana El Kaliouby of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's sad because people then avoid having conversations with them."
The "emotional social intelligence prosthetic" device, which El Kaliouby is constructing along with MIT colleagues Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters, consists of a camera small enough to be pinned to the side of a pair of glasses, connected to a hand-held computer running image recognition software plus software that can read the emotions these images show. If the wearer seems to be failing to engage his or her listener, the software makes the hand-held computer vibrate.
In 2004 El Kaliouby demonstrated that her software, developed with Peter Robinson at the University of Cambridge, could detect whether someone is agreeing, disagreeing, concentrating, thinking, unsure or interested, just from a few seconds of video footage. Previous computer programs have only detected the six more basic emotional states of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. El Kaliouby's complex states are more useful because they come up more frequently in conversation, but are also harder to detect, because they are conveyed in a sequence of movements rather than a single expression.
Her program is based on a machine-learning algorithm that she trained by showing it more than 100 8-second video clips of actors expressing particular emotions. The software picks out movements of the eyebrows, lips and nose, and tracks head movements such as tilting, nodding and shaking, which it then associates with the emotion the actor was showing. When presented with fresh video clips, the software gets people's emotions right 90 per cent of the time when the clips are of actors, and 64 per cent of the time on footage of ordinary people.
El Kaliouby is now training the software on excerpts from movies and footage captured by webcams. This week she plans to gather the first on-the-move training footage by equipping a group of volunteers, some of whom are autistic, with wearable cameras.
Getting the software to work is only the first step, Picard warns. In its existing form it makes heavy demands on computing power, so it may need to be pared down to work on a standard hand-held computer. Other challenges include finding a high-resolution digital camera that can be worn comfortably, and training people with autism to look at the faces of those they are conversing with so that the camera picks up their expressions.
The team will present the device next week at the Body Sensor Network conference at MIT. People with autism are not the only ones who stand to benefit. Timothy Bickmore of Northeastern University in Boston, who studies ways in which computers can be made to engage with people's emotions, says the device would be a great teaching aid. "I would love it if you could have a computer looking at each student in the room to tell me when 20 per cent of them were bored or confused."
source:http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025456.500-device-warns-you-if-youre-boring-or-irritating.html
Google Accused of Bio-piracy
source:http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/03/30/1336221.shtml
Secondhand gadgets win reprieve from Japan's "worst law ever"
Are old electrical goods dangerous just by virtue of being old? The Japanese government clearly thinks so. Almost five years ago, it fired a warning shot across the bow of the secondhand electrical goods industry with the cheerfully named Electrical Appliance and Material Safety Law, a motion passed in the Diet in early 2001.
The aim: the eradication of the supposedly dangerous and aged electrical goods finding their way on to the secondhand market. Who could possibly object?
The law was due to come into full force at the end of this week, replacing and updating the Electrical Appliance and Material Control Law, passed in 1999.
The more recent law caused more consternation, though. It would ban the sale of goods manufactured before the year 2001, unless they fulfilled a safety test - which in many cases could cost several times more than the item was now worth.
The Japanese secondhand electrical goods market was officially estimated last year to be worth around £500m - though this figure isn't close to being accurate; it's much more lucrative. The ambiguity is due to the lack of regulation of secondhand shops and their quick turnover. Shops are often gone from one month to the next.
The government probably hoped the law would go largely unnoticed and bring a variety of benefits. By taking the money out of the secondhand market and injecting it into the market for new goods, regulation (of old products) and revivalisation (of the economy) would be achieved in one fell swoop. On paper, anyway.
In practice it was rather different. Public resistance has been vociferous and virtually unanimous. Famous Japanese musicians such as Ryuichi Sakamoto led a 75,000-strong petition, stating in the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper that "whether something is vintage or not is not a matter for government officials to decide".
Musicians particularly despised the law because new instruments are almost always beyond the meagre means of budding musicians. Putting secondhand electronic instruments beyond their reach would kill a vibrant music industry. Sakamoto backed this up further in a joint statement with the Japan Synthesizer Programmers Association, saying: "This will greatly hinder the development of Japanese music and artistic culture."
The law would also have affected the sale of secondhand and classic gaming hardware, a market that has fuelled the finances of many a shopkeeper and helped keep the games industry in line. With punters able to experience the history of gaming through the ease and affordability of access to such hardware, Japanese games developers have had to craft increasingly innovative titles. Games creators such as Keita Takahashi, the principal designer of the Katamari Damacy games, cite gaming history as a touchstone for "making games fun".
Musicians, gamers; add in a large swath of the press citing this law as simply the "worst law ever" and the government had a big problem on its hands.
So on March 14, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry agreed to conduct the safety tests free of charge for six months, and rent out the testing equipment. It even exempted the hotly contested "vintage" musical instruments.
However, while the musicians were now safe, the shop owners appeared terminally threatened. As one told the Daily Yomiuri newspaper: "I didn't know of the measure until recently, and now I'm almost out of business."
With the law's implementation looming, there was panic buying and emergency sales of secondhand stock. Not quite the stealth law hoped for.
Thus last Friday the law was revised, making 1989 the cut-off date for "old" rather than 2001. In addition, many of the older items won't have to be certified with the requisite safety tests either. It was an almost complete reversal - something that is almost without precedent in Japan.
Had the law gone ahead unchanged, on April 1 more than 450 types of electrical appliances would have been deemed unsafe in Japan. The ban would have released a flood of secondhand games, gaming hardware and musical instruments on to the export market. As it is, if you want to import that rare piece of gaming or musical heritage, it will still cost you a small fortune.
source:http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1742110,00.html
Scrutinizing a Stem Cell Trial
As a quadriplegic, I've read a lot of hype about paralysis cures. So I was eager to find out if Geron, a California stem cell company, had the substance to back up its claims of being poised to launch the world's first clinical trial of an embryonic stem cell-based therapy to treat spinal cord injury.
Going into my interview with Tom Okarma, the company's CEO, I knew this trial would not benefit me directly because it will focus on recent injuries -- I was injured nine years ago in a car accident that rendered my body paralyzed from the shoulders down.
My concern was that Geron's scientists were being hasty. If the first embryonic stem cell trial failed miserably because the company's researchers weren't cautious enough, funding for other research projects would likely diminish and ultimately keep me paralyzed longer.
After an hour of speaking to Okarma, fears of a half-baked trial dissipated. He readily answered my many questions. If he didn't have the animal data to answer a query, he didn't try to dance around that fact.
Okarma outlined a structured but malleable trial. I initially had reservations about safety, but Okarma emphasized that if the animal data is not good, the study will not move forward until problems are addressed.
I'm reassured the trial will proceed with as safe a framework as is possible. Whether it will work remains to be seen. That's why we have clinical trials.
Wired News: In April of 2005, Geron was conducting preliminary toxicity studies (known as pre-investigational new drug, or pre-IND, studies) in animals to address Food and Drug Administration concerns. How are they going?
Tom Okarma: We will complete our IND-enabling studies, which are now in process and still on track, and file our IND during the fourth quarter of this year, assuming the preclinical data continue to go well. That starts a 30-day review clock by the FDA, who then has 30 days to either accept our IND and allow us to proceed or, at that point, they have questions that we must answer before we can begin. We are on track for that. So, assuming they bless the IND, we would hope to be in the clinic in the first quarter of (2007).
The toxicity studies that we do are fairly standard for any new product going into man, with the addition that we do chronic toxicity because this is not a drug that would be excreted in 24 hours. There are cells that will stay in, hopefully indefinitely, so both the toxicity and the tumorigenesis (tumor growth) studies are six and 12 months in duration.
WN: Will patients have to worry about immune rejection with the cells you're injecting (called oligodendrocyte progenitor cells, or OPCs)?
Okarma: It turns out that the differentiated cells that we make and put into animals are not recognized by the human immune system, and we published this last year. It's a striking finding.
WN: In the animal studies that you're doing, how do you deliver the OPCs?
Okarma: Directly into the injury site. In the clinical human trials, they will be injected directly into the injured spinal cord site either during spine stabilization surgery or, depending on when that's performed, percutaneously (through the skin) in a separate procedure. We've developed a gizmo that has a fiber-optic device to enable the neurosurgeon to visually watch the needle as the instrument places it appropriately into the spinal cord and injects the cells so they migrate once they're injected into the cord in between the injured axons and find their way to create the myelin sheath (the protective coating of nerve fiber).
WN: Last year, scientists reported that some of the embryonic stem cells approved for federal funding and available at the National Institutes of Health are contaminated by animal cells. Will the cells you transplant be grown in all-human media, free of animal products?
Okarma: Better than that. Not only all-human, it's all defined chemically. So there's no serum in it. There's no conditioned medium that has undefined materials in it. So it's very squeaky clean, as is the differentiation process now done under good manufacturing practices (GMP) here.
We've got the world's only GMP master cell bank of human embryonic stem cells with lines that are fully qualified for human use which, by the way, are two of Bush's approved lines. So the stuff you hear published that all of those lines are irrevocably contaminated with mouse materials and could never be used in people -- hogwash. If you know how to grow them, they're fine.
WN: The primary focus for Phase 1 trials are safety. What outcomes are you looking for in these first trials to convince you to move into Phase 2 trials?
Okarma: We're (planning on) doing a Phase 1-2, it's a combination. We will test this in patients with the injury. A pure Phase 1 is done in people without a disease; we're doing this in diseased patients, so it's a Phase 1-2. It will be a controlled trial -- not randomized, not blinded, but controlled. We do expect that there will be some patients who will not want the cells, and we would hope that they would be willing to be in the control group, meaning they're matched by the extent of the injury and other patient characteristics to the patients who get the cells so that we can actually compare the rehab progress of these patients with and without the cells.
We recognize that the world's spotlights are going to be on this. So we want to structure out as much subjective stuff as we possibly can. That's the first point. The second point, again to your point of safety, is that the initial patients in the trial a) will get a very low dose of cells, which is always done with a new therapy. They just start with less than the therapeutic range because you want to be sure there's no toxicity associated with this.
How are we going to monitor for toxicity in a patient that has a complete thoracic injury, that has no sensation below the point of injury? Well, if we start with a T3 lesion (an injury at the third vertebra in the thoracic region of the spinal cord), the question will be: Do we see evidence of an ascending paralysis? In other words, changing patients' physiology from a T3 lesion to a T2 or a T1, ascending toxicity.
We start with complete patients because they have no hope of recovery and we want to offer them something. We're starting with thoracic lesions because there's no significant impact for the patient should we see toxicity go from, say, a T3 to a T2 lesion. If we had started with cervical complete lesions and went from C4 to C2, that would be significant because we would reduce respiratory drive.
We're turning every single stone over that we can to reduce -- if not eliminate -- the risk to these patients who volunteer to get the cells for the first time. Once we go through the initial safety cohorts ... then we start looking at incomplete lesions. For all these patients, the efficacy is based on three simple principles: Do we restore sensation in any way or conversely reduce neuritic plan? Do we change bowel or bladder control? Do we see patients enjoying some degree of local motor recovery?
All of these things are monitored by America Spinal Injury Association, which have been developed to follow patients with incomplete lesions who can respond modestly to intense physical therapy. All of those endpoint measures are all validated and ready for us to use. We didn't have to invent anything.
Our fondest hope is that, even in cases that have no hope of spontaneous recovery, we actually provide value. Now that may not happen. We may not see any responses in the first cohorts of patients who have complete lesions, which is why we're progressing thereafter to patients with incomplete lesions which resemble more closely the animal model, which is where the excitement began. Those animals are models of incomplete lesions. But for reasons of ethics and safety and appropriateness, we can't start with patients who resembled the animal model. You have to start way upstream.
WN: Will those who choose to be in the control group receive methylprednisolone, the currently recommended treatment for acute spinal cord injury?
Okarma: Everybody in both groups will get that.
WN: That sounds good. Thank you for your time, and I hope you have a good day.
Okarma: You, too. Bye-bye.
source:http://www.wired.com/news/technology/medtech/0,70521-1.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1
