Teenage Girl Develops App to Help the Blind

“The fact that I’m the only girl interested in my high school going to these hackathons is really sad. Maitreyee Joshi, senior at Lynbrook High, has a deep passion for building technologies that help the physically and mentally disabled people.

“The fact that I’m the only girl interested in my high school going to these hackathons is really sad". 

Maitreyee Joshi, senior at Lynbrook High, has a deep passion for building technologies that help the physically and mentally disabled people.

For example, while working at Stanford Research Labs, she built a head controlled quadcopter in order to facilitate movement for her professor’s mute quadriplegic friend. Also, for last year’s science fair project, she wrote an biclustering algorithm that found DNA mutations that caused a brain tumor called Glioblastoma Multiforme.

Currently, Maitreyee is focusing her attention on the blind. With the popularity and spur of iPhone apps being developed, she thought over the summer of how she could use the same to build a systemized technology for the blind. It wasn’t long till she was able to build an iPhone game app that helped blind people develop their spatial skills and navigate through new environments. Testing it out with the blind proved to be a surprised. After playing the game only twice they were able to map out the entire building they were in.

It was with this that Maitreyee knew that she was onto something, and decided that she would develop it further along. Maitreyee is a rarity amongst other girls in her high school in which she is an aspiring tech engineer and interested in things like robotics and hackathons. Although, she is aware that being interested in tech has that nerdy connotation, Maitreyee is thankful that she goes to a high school which is academically focused and welcomes similar and more students like her.

But, as she has admitted several times, the experience of being sometimes the only girl interested in tech in her high school can be quite frustrating.

“I wish that I had more friends that are girls that can come along with me to these hackathons. Most of the time I’m with a group of guys all the time, which can get really annoying and sometimes drive you away.”

Maitreyee also recalls a similar experience when she was working on a robotics club in school.

“I would have loved it if the girls on the team were more actively involved in things other than public relations or marketing.”

However, with women like Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg, Maitreyee is excited at the prospect of being the only femgineer in her high school, which she believes makes her unique and a crusader as well.

“I feel like I’m a fighter going against social conventions, which excites me.”

As Maitreyee begins to scale her iPhone app. she is beginning to learn early lessons and dilemmas that other engineers in startups face which is stepping outside the building.

Before finding success with testing out the app with blind people, Maitreyee was showing signs of disinterest and was continually doubting that the app would work at all. What made it even worse was that she had a meeting with one of the Accessible Technology instructors at the Silicon Valley Blind Center.

“I was scared about showing him my prototype, and that it wouldn’t be good enough.”

Maitreyee was so scared that she canceled the meeting and then again for the second time.

“I’ve always felt that it wasn’t ready enough, if I had a bit more time to fine-tune, work out the logic, and fix the bugs then it would be fine.”

After a couple of weeks it was time again to meet and present the prototype.

“That night I really wanted to cancel. But I knew that it was starting to get out of control and that I couldn’t keep canceling these meetings.”

Summing up all her courage she decided just to go with it.

Nervously presenting her prototype, Maitreyee was shocked that he enjoyed it when they were testing it out.

Maitreyee Joshi. Volunteer Position: Web Content Specialist.
EducateHaitiNow

“As he went through his thought process and described a verbal layout of the building, I was starting to get excited and thinking that this may actually just work.”

The meeting was just the push that Maitreyee needed to take on the development further.

In hindsight, she knew that she had exaggerated the situation and was stuck in a cycle of thinking that the prototype was never good enough, which she regrets. Asking what advice she would give to others engineers who get stuck in the same cycle of thinking, she replied “Just face your fears, push yourself to go outside, take the leap, and just do it!”


To follow Maitreyee progress you can visit her website at

http://www.maitreyeejoshi.com/

Sources: Femgineer

App Captures the Boston Bombing’s Psychological Effects

ORIGINAL: IEEE Spectrum
By Eliza Strickland
27 Aug 2013


Could psychological-monitoring apps become as common as fitness and activity gadgets?

Image: Cogito A Mind Minder: Cogito's mood-monitoring app can detect signals of psychological distress

In April, the software company Cogito was halfway through a clinical trial to see if it could detect symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) through a smartphone app. All of the 100 participants in the study lived around Boston. Then, on 15 April, two bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds. Suddenly, Cogito’s clinical trial was a lot more relevant.

The trial was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under its Detection and Computational Analysis of Psychological Signals program. To address the troubling number of psychological problems and suicides among active-duty military personnel and veterans, the U.S. Department of Defense is seeking technologies that can identify at-risk individuals so professionals can help them.

Cogito, a Boston-based MIT spin-off, developed an app that keeps track of a person’s social behavior and vocal characteristics. The app monitors the phone’s location and time of use and also logs phone calls and text messages. (It doesn’t look at the content of those calls and texts.) Finally, there’s an active component: Participants can choose to fill out questionnaires about their mood and can record audio diaries. Cogito’s expertise is in automated speech analysis, which it applies to those audio diaries; future iterations could mine phone conversations for information as well.

Put all the data together and you’re able to tell a lot about a person, says Cogito CEO Joshua Feast. Sometimes you even find signs of distress that people don’t want to admit to or haven’t recognized themselves. “We’re able to look at sleep, mood, social isolation, and physical isolation,” says Feast, all of which can serve as “honest signals” of psychological trouble. In the Boston trial, Cogito was only testing the sophisticated algorithms it developed to aggregate the data. If the trial works out, future versions of the software could provide these summaries to clinicians to allow them to intervene and could also give the information to the subjects themselves.

All of this can seem rather creepy—apps that get inside your head and reveal your emotional secrets. But Feast says that’s why his company places so much emphasis on privacy and trust. If Cogito’s system becomes a commercial product, there will be legal guarantees that a user will always own and control his or her own data. For example, a user could choose whether or not to share the data with a clinician. Feast says he doesn’t think users would have it any other way. “Morally it’s the right thing to do, and also for adoption it’s the right thing to do,” he says.

The participants in the Boston trial included veterans, civilians with histories of trauma or depression, and some healthy civilians. While the bulk of the data from the study is still being analyzed, Feast says the impact of the April bombing is already clear. The algorithms picked up more markers of stress in the participants, including decreased use of the app’s interactive components. “Fewer survey questions were being answered, and fewer audio diaries were being recorded,” he says.

Further study of the data will answer other important questions about the nature of depression and PTSD, says Feast: “What is resilience? What kind of people fared better after the bombing? What happens to people with vulnerability when things like this happen?” The company is still formulating its research questions, he says.

The Durkheim Project, another initiative funded by this DARPA program, focuses more narrowly on identifying veterans at risk of suicide. Chris Poulin, director of the project, explains that his system predicts suicide risk by analyzing veterans’ text messages and their posting on social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Poulin says he’s impressed with the scope of Cogito’s data collection and its incorporation of voice monitoring. “There are other people out there collecting mobile data and looking at activity metrics, but very few people have integrated voice data,” he says.

Cogito’s voice-analysis software, Cogito Dialog, monitors vocal characteristics such as level of excitement and fluidity of speech. Feast explains that it’s tricky to get clear data in this area because there’s so much natural variation in people’s speech habits. However, the system can detect changes to an individual’s speech patterns over time and can also be useful in telemedicine. For example, if a clinician calls veterans and asks them all the same series of questions, a monitoring system can flag people with unusual responses. “Speech analysis is well suited for looking at population norms and deviation from the norms,” says Feast.

Feast believes that the company’s experience with the Boston bombing provides a preview of a possible future where psychological monitoring apps are as common as the fitness and activity gadgets that proliferate today. “When there’s an earthquake or terrorist attack or traumatic event that hits a population center, this technology could support a rapid response team for psychological distress,” he says. “It would be like the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] responding to a flu outbreak.”

Green Chemistry on your Smart Phone!

ORIGINAL: Green Chemistry Blog
by Julian
Posted on April 8, 2013

“Incorporating Green Chemistry Concepts into Mobile Chemistry Applications and Their Potential Uses.” Ekins, S.; Clark, A. M.; Williams, A. J. ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 2013, 1, 8-13. DOI: 10.1021/sc3000509

We here at GreenChemBlog have not posted in a while, but still hope to post and are still looking for contributors to the blog. Posts might be a bit shorter going forward, though, in order for us to post more frequently.

I’ve expanded my reading recently to include a new ACS journal, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. In the first issue is the above article, which highlights a few recent additions to the smart phone/tablet world that utilize green chemistry!

The focus of the above paper is mostly on “Green Solvents”, which the authors developed based on the ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable Solvent Selection Guide. It is freely available for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. (I personally use the Android platform for which the very similar app “Lab Solvents” is available) The authors also cover a few other green chemistry apps, so read the paper for more info! I especially like the Process Mass Intensity feature of the Yield101 app, though this app is $5.

For Green Solvents, the app entry page features a list of common solvents displayed as their chemical structures. More desirable solvents are color coded with a green background; less desirable solvents are color coded with a brown background. Selecting a solvent molecule brings up a box that lists the chemical’s name, CAS number, as well as scores on a scale of 1 – 10 for each of the five following categories: safety, health, environment (air), environment (water), and environment (waste). The lower the number, the greener the solvent. In addition, the numbers are color coded with 1-3 displayed as green, 4-7 displayed as yellow and 8-10 displayed as red. Furthermore, the selection box includes easily chosen links to the ChemSpider Web site, the Mobile Reagents app, and the Mobile Molecular DataSheet for more information on the selected solvent.

The power of the app is how quickly one can obtain info that should impact solvent choices in lab or in the field (without having to retreat to your desk or a nearby computer). And it’s free!

In the future I hope to see these apps provide suggestions for alternative solvent choices (for example, this editorial provides an example of a table Pfizer uses for solvent selection). For instance, I already know dichloromethane is a poor choice of solvent from a green chemistry perspective. How about an alternative choice, Green Solvents app? Trifluorotoluene?

A gallery of disruptive technologies

ORIGINAL: McKinsey

The relentless parade of new technologies is unfolding on many fronts. Almost every advance is billed as a breakthrough, and the list of “next big things” grows ever longer. Not every emerging technology will alter the business or social landscape—but some truly do have the potential to disrupt the status quo, alter the way people live and work, and rearrange value pools. It is therefore critical that business and policy leaders understand which technologies will matter to them and prepare accordingly.

Disruptive technologies
MGI's Michael Chui discusses the most economically disruptive technologies that will transform business and life in next decade.

Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute, cuts through the noise and identifies 12 technologies that could drive truly massive economic transformations and disruptions in the coming years. The report also looks at exactly how these technologies could change our world, as well as their benefits and challenges, and offers guidelines to help leaders from businesses and other institutions respond.

We estimate that, together, applications of the 12 technologies discussed in the report could have a potential economic impact between $14 trillion and $33 trillion a year in 2025. This estimate is neither predictive nor comprehensive. It is based on an in-depth analysis of key potential applications and the value they could create in a number of ways, including the consumer surplus that arises from better products, lower prices, a cleaner environment, and better health.

Some technologies detailed in the report have been gestating for years and thus will be familiar. Others are more surprising. Examples of the 12 disruptive technologies include:

Advanced robotics—that is, increasingly capable robots or robotic tools, with enhanced “senses,” dexterity, and intelligence—can take on tasks once thought too delicate or uneconomical to automate. These technologies can also generate significant societal benefits, including robotic surgical systems that make procedures less invasive, as well as robotic prosthetics and “exoskeletons” that restore functions of amputees and the elderly.


Next-generation genomics marries the science used for imaging nucleotide base pairs (the units that make up DNA) with rapidly advancing computational and analytic capabilities. As our understanding of the genomic makeup of humans increases, so does the ability to manipulate genes and improve health diagnostics and treatments. Next-generation genomics will offer similar advances in our understanding of plants and animals, potentially creating opportunities to improve the performance of agriculture and to create high-value substances—for instance, ethanol and biodiesel—from ordinary organisms, such as E. coli bacteria.

Energy-storage devices or physical systems store energy for later use. These technologies, such as lithium-ion batteries and fuel cells, already power electric and hybrid vehicles, along with billions of portable consumer electronics. Over the coming decade, advancing energy-storage technology could make electric vehicles cost competitive, bring electricity to remote areas of developing countries, and improve the efficiency of the utility grid.

The potential benefits of the technologies discussed in the report are tremendous—but so are the challenges of preparing for their impact. If business and government leaders wait until these technologies are exerting their full influence on the economy, it will be too late to capture the benefits or react to the consequences. While the appropriate responses will vary by stakeholder and technology, we find that certain guiding principles can help businesses and governments as they plan for the effects of disruptive technologies.

Business leaders should keep their organizational strategies updated in the face of continually evolving technologies, ensure that their organizations continue to look ahead, and use technologies to improve internal performance. Disruptive technologies can change the game for businesses, creating entirely new products and services, as well as shifting pools of value between producers or from producers to consumers. Organizations will often need to use business-model innovations to capture some of that value. Leaders need to plan for a range of scenarios, abandoning assumptions about where competition and risk could come from, and not be afraid to look beyond long-established models. Organizations will also need to keep their employees’ skills up-to-date and balance the potential benefits of emerging technologies with the risks they sometimes pose.

Policy makers can use advanced technology to address their own operational challenges (for example, by deploying the Internet of Things to improve infrastructure management). The nature of work will continue to change, and that will require strong education and retraining programs. To address challenges that the new technologies themselves will bring, policy makers can use some of those very technologies—for example, by creating new educational and training systems with the mobile Internet, which can also help address an ever-increasing productivity imperative to deliver public services more efficiently and effectively. To develop a more nuanced and useful view of technology’s impact, governments may also want to consider new metrics that capture more than GDP effects. This approach can help policy makers balance the need to encourage growth with their responsibility to look out for the public welfare as new technologies reshape economies and lives.

About the authors

James Manyika and Richard Dobbs are directors of the McKinsey Global Institute, where Michael Chui is a principal; Jacques Bughin is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office; Peter Bisson is a director in the Stamford office.

'Hologram-lite' idea for 3D phone displays

ORIGINAL: Nature

Maggie McKee

20 March 2013

Tiny gratings in a visual display could beam images in different directions.

Forget 4G — the future of mobile technology is 3D. Researchers in California have built a prototype three-dimensional (3D) display using a method that might one day be developed to create videos that dance above a tablet, mobile phone or wrist watch and can be viewed from a range of angles.

Holography, the gold standard for 3D display, reconstructs the light that bounces off an object at every angle1. A hologram uses a complicated pattern on a plane so that light passing through it diffracts and interferes to produce a life-like image. But, so far, moving holograms — like the ethereal video of Princess Leia in Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) — remain in the realm of science fiction. This is because it takes much too long to calculate and produce these shifting patterns for any viewing angle.

Now physicist David Fattal and his colleagues at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto have developed a sort of 'hologram-lite' approach. It uses simple diffraction — not interference — to create 3D images that can be altered at video speeds, as the authors report in the current issue of Nature2.

"It's almost like breaking down a hologram into several finite pieces," Fattal says. It involves etching linear grooves — diffraction gratings — onto a thin glass slab (see image below). Light from light-emitting diodes is then sent sideways through the slab, and some of it is scattered out of the slab in a direction determined by the spacing and orientation of the grooves. The grooves are grouped into circular patterns, each of which sends a light ray out of the slab in a particular direction.

ALBERT JEANS

The array of gratings and the directions of the corresponding light beams are fixed. So to create an image, a patterned mask is placed over the fixed array of gratings, so that some escaping light rays are blocked and others are transmitted. This way, the display beams different images in different directions, so that a person's left and right eyes see slightly different images — a requirement for the brain to process an image as 3D. Moving the display screen around also produces different images, so that it appears as if the object were being viewed from up to 64 different vantage points over a field of view spanning 90 degrees.

If individual cells in the patterned mask can be darkened at will — using liquid crystals, as in an ordinary LCD screen — the display can also produce moving images. Figuring out how to modulate the LCD screen to produce the views is orders of magnitude easier than working out the complicated interference patterns needed to make a moving hologram visible from any direction, says Fattal.

And because each circular diffraction grating is just 12 micrometres across, the system is ideally suited to mobile technologies, which are viewed at distances of less than a metre. "When you have a short viewing distance, you need to have a high resolution," says Fattal. "Otherwise it looks like a bunch of big squares."

Existing 3D-display technologies tend to have larger pixel sizes and therefore operate better at distances of a few metres, he says. For example, many commercial 3D televisions use lenses to send underlying light sources in different directions. But the pixels in that case tend to be larger, he explains, because it is difficult to produce small lenses of high optical quality.

Nick Holliman, a computer scientist at Durham University, UK, describes the work from Fattal's team as "a very nice idea and a great technology demonstrator". But he points out that light designed to bleed between each of the 64 different views — to prevent jarring jumps — is 10 times as bright as typically used. "The commercial question is, will consumers be happy with the trade-off of having more viewing freedom with a poorer quality image?"

With further development, the authors say the technology might one day be used for visualisation of the shapes of molecules used in drug development, or for eye-popping views of the Earth.

Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2013.12647