SDF

Lama Nachman

Keeping Hawking Talking

Lama Nachman’s team embarked on an adventure with Professor Stephen Hawking to explore what could be done to improve his ability to communicate and operate his computer. Dr. Hawking has suffered from ALS for more than fifty years and the disease has impacted his ability to control his muscles, leaving him unable to speak. For decades, he relied on software that he operated by pushing a button, but as his condition deteriorated, he had to switch to an infrared sensor mounted on his glasses that he triggered via cheek movement. As his speed declined, the team explored many off-the-shelf solutions but were unable to utilize any of them despite the great advances in this space. Dr. Hawking was looking for a familiar interface, something that didn’t require a steep learning curve.

In this talk, Lama Nachman will describe Intel’s 5 year journey with Professor Hawking, their learnings from exploring deeply his needs and the solution that they ultimately built and deployed. She will describe the reasons behind open sourcing Intel’s platform and how they are hoping to make it accessible to researchers, developers and end users. As technology has gone mobile over the last decade, there have been a lot of innovations in sensing, understanding and assistance to help us overcome many “temporal” handicaps and constraints from communicating while driving to controlling our home from afar. These innovations pave the way to a much more accessible world and reduce the burden in building assistive technologies by enabling a lot of reuse.