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A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
- Brajeshwar 5y agoCool. 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.
- scrollaway 5y ago> why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router. I’d be pissed too. You don’t mess with the router without warning people using it ;)
- nexuist 5y agoWonder where she got that from?
- NavinF 5y ago> why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router I’m with her on this one. Not announcing the outage before it happens is kinda disrespectful.
- martneumann 5y ago"Daaad, are you complaining about me on the Internet again?!" ;)
- mschuster91 5y ago> 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.
- Brajeshwar 5y agoWell, 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. :-)
- blitzar 5y agoAnd you cant do this durring a) the school day when the primary end user is not home or b) wake up at 2am and reboot it while the primary end user is asleep? Honestly, I think your kid should break out the SLA and check what compensation they get paid for prime time outages.
- Brajeshwar 5y agoYes, lesson learnt and we have agreed to the new agreement -- no more primetime outages -- planned or otherwise.
- dkersten 5y agoI mean, another solution is to give warning at regular intervals beforehand (day, hour, ten minutes, 1 minute perhaps). Basically planned outages with ample warning. Of course, avoiding prime time planned outages is always good in any scenario and I'm sure goes a long way to keep all clients happy. With that said, I doubt your 13 year old daughter client is actually paying for that level of service, so... ;-)
- blitzar 5y agoI believe the SLA for a 13 year old is 110% uptime, with consequences being The end of the world. I am not a lawyer so feel free to go to court claiming that 100% uptime is the limits of mathematics or that the world will not end if <insert social media platform of choice> is not accessible for 5 minutes on a tuesday afternoon. Its a losing case every time, best just to settle up the case quietly with an extra scoop of icecream or some robux and cut your losses.
- fortran77 5y agoMy 13-year-old cat can probably sniff out pneumonia. If only he could talk and tell us what he's smelling.
- nickkell 5y agoAll the signs were there. If only we had eyes to see them!
- efdee 5y agoYou rebooted the router? Without prior warning? That's the 2020 equivalent of your parents picking up the phone while you're online on dialup.
- didip 5y agoDid you send a downtime notification to her and update your family’s status page?
- Brajeshwar 5y agoYes, I did but I forgot to send her notification on our Discord channel too.
- honkycat 5y agoShe's a child. I'm sure this kid has his moments as well. 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.
- russellbeattie 5y agoMy 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.
- dekhn 5y agoa 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 go slugs
- russellbeattie 5y agocrispr is quite easy Ha! This is HN, I should totally know better than to throw stuff like that out there. I admit, as I wrote the crispr line, in the back of my head I wondered if it was true or not and just went with it because I thought it sounded witty. I stand corrected!
- causi 5y agoIs 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.
- donio 5y agoUnfortunately 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.
- causi 5y agoI 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.
- periheli0n 5y ago100% agree. Great achievement by the 13 year old but insinuating that this device can detect pneumonia is utterly misleading.
- dekhn 5y agoI'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"
- croes 5y ago>No door is ever closed. You can do anything! I am a thirteen-year-old kid, and I can do this—if I can do it, anyone can! For some, doors are not only closed, but they are also slammed in their faces with full force
- alexk307 5y agoThis 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.
- rhexs 5y agoMaybe. 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 life than getting into MIT.
- foolinaround 5y agoIf the kid was innately driven to do this, a big win for the kid and for humanity... 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...
- kartben_ 5y agoTo briefly clarify on why I believe it is the former: Caleb just happened to have caught a really bad fungal pneumonia when he was 9yo, and that was his inspiration to explore what could be done to diagnose things differently. And he just happened to do tons of research to try and re-use open source technology, etc.
- alexk307 5y agoThere'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.
- the-dude 5y agoI wonder what his parents do for a living. Just curious.
- csdvrx 5y agoDoes it matter? Watching everything through the myopic lens of "privilege" is wrong. A kid can have an idea and parents can help. For now, the set of {kids, parents} that can do that is limited. But technology changes and becomes more accessible. What matters is the new things that become not just possible but easy and cheap. For a previously "costly" problem that in 2012 would involve a 5 MP digital pictures + geotagging + OCR then sending the raws for GPU processing, any random smartphone from 2022 will do. In 2012 you could have screamed "privilege!". Not in 2022. As a kid, I'd have loved to try to hack together a app that recognizes mushrooms (or flowers, or fruits which I all found so super interesting, especially bugs and OMG they fly if I blew on them!!) It would have been hard. I would have benefited from some help. But I would have had a lot of fun, after which I would have used the app to fill in the name for my leaf-book collection effort (I wanted to have a specimen of EVERYTHING from the garden, then from the street, then...) I only had books and some websites and a bad camera. So I drew :) A kid now could have picture search engines like yandex to do better with a much better camera too (MACRO MODE!) and some generic photo processing software. A rich kid then could have had something similar, with an expansive Nikon camera, and photoshop (crop, filter...) and maybe some parental connections to biologists and botanists. Is it privilege if they did? Yes. And it's wonderful because every kid has this privilege now! And they can have more fun!
- foolinaround 5y agowe need to identify the factors that enabled this awesome kid to have the background knowledge, tools, environment etc and see how we can replicate them to find other such diamonds in the wild...
- rebelde 5y agoI highly suspect that his parents "have the background knowledge, tools, environment etc".
- blueatlas 5y agoTo what end? Our world is not short of this kind of talent, at any age. Those that have these abilities will get there, in time. So maybe it would be better at that age to teach them to paint, throw a baseball, fly fish, travel, etc.
- foolinaround 5y agoWhy should they be taught to paint or to throw a baseball but not to use a tool (like a program, etc) I was merely saying that the knowledge and facilities to paint, to play baseball or program should be accessible, and kids must be exposed to the fact that they exist... then, the kids pick per their inclination?
- em-bee 5y agoknowledge does not motivate people to do great things. what children need to learn first and foremost is to be good people, create the desire to help others and contribute to society. once they have that, they drive themselves to learn what they need in order to achieve that. this kid here had the drive to solve a problem because they had experienced it themselves. it doesn't matter how they solved it and how much help they got, what matters is what drove them to solve the problem in the first place. if we can create that drive then any of the above, whether it is art, sports or programming will happen based on the kids motivation.
- Ataraxiaist 5y ago
- bb123 5y agoDoes 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wjp3 5y agoI'm immediately reminded of the science fair projects in elementary school where it was clearly obvious that the parent did all of the work.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y agoI 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.
- thatcat 5y agoI 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.
- colechristensen 5y ago
- Herodotus38 5y agoI wish I could read the paper. I’m interested in what kind of fungal pneumonia they were looking at. My googling got me to find the title on the Middle School Facebook page but not sure if it’s available ti read.
- kartben_ 5y agoI'll check with Caleb but I am guessing/hoping he will be willing to make the paper more broadly accessible soon.
- Herodotus38 5y agoThanks, for reference I am a hospital physician (internal medicine) so I do occasionally deal with fungal pneumonia.
- thatcat 5y agoI doubt that it is possible to differentiate between fungal types using gas sensors trained on spores being released.
- Herodotus38 5y agoI would be interested in what they are testing, it probably wouldn’t be spores but likely something along the lines of biochemical compounds specific to certain species. For example we use blood tests for the presence of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactomannan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactomannan to help diagnose invasive aspergillosis.
- thatcat 5y agoThat requires wetlab work and those compounds usually aren't aerosolized, but i agree it would still be interesting to know the exact details
- amelius 5y agoThe 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.
- hwillis 5y agoThe 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.
- amelius 5y agoThe reason why no engineer has made this yet, is because the medical data was not available to them. The innovation is in the data, not in the ML.
- beeforpork 5y ago> No door is ever closed. You can do anything! I am a thirteen-year-old kid, and I can do this—if I can do it, anyone can! If only a goal of education was to get kids to feel like this! Of course, not everyone is equally bright, but without the above attitude, they will not even try, not even try to be interested, because they think they are too dumb, which is a tragedy.
- technicolorwhat 5y agoPretty awesome project really! As a sidenote: A bunch of the ML training and edge deployment magic is done via https://edgeimpulse.com https://edgeimpulse.com which seems to make it much more accessible to build such a thing.
- ravenstine 5y agoHmmm... 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.
- chokma 5y agoI have a mid-price gadget for measuring inside air quality - it detects VOC and formaldehyde, along with PM2.5 / PM 10. It also detects alcohol from drinking a couple of beers as a dangerous increase in formaldehyde...
- somebodynew 5y agoIt 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pdepip 5y agoDoes anyone have any recommended reading or resources for someone interested in getting involved in similar work?
- honkycat 5y agoI 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"
- lern_too_spel 5y agoI 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.
- honkycat 5y agoI agree! No smoke between me and people who are well off! 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.
- 5y ago
- mywittyname 5y agoI remember having an assignment like this my second year of college. It was basically an array of various smoke detector sensors wired up to a parallel port. With diverse enough sensors, you could stick a cup into a box with a fan and the sensor, and be able to tell if the cup had OJ, coke, or coffee in it using basic PCA. Given the tools available now, I'm not surprised a smart 13yo could build something like this. Especially if the sensor itself is an off-the-shelf component with device drivers and such already available for it.
- 99_00 5y agoI had no idea there was an e-nose project out there. Is e-nose a field with active research or is it something that's seen as being just too hard/cross disciplinary? I see robust e-nose as being a huge development that would change how we see the world.
- dekhn 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_nose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_nose see the citations for real-world examples (and a lot of PR fluff). Did you ever measure a smell? Can you tell whether one smell is just twice strong as another? Can you measure the difference between two kinds of smell and another? It is very obvious that we have very many different kinds of smells, all the way from the odour of violets and roses up to asafetida. But until you can measure their likeness and differences, you can have no science of odour. If you are ambitious to find a new science, measure a smell. — Alexander Graham Bell, 1914
- daenz 5y agoGreat on Caleb for this accomplishment! >No door is ever closed. You can do anything! I am a thirteen-year-old kid, and I can do this—if I can do it, anyone can! Although he may have similar opportunities to his peers, he (understandably) doesn't yet realize that he has a "spark" that not everyone is fortunate enough to cultivate. Age is not strictly the limiting factor to being capable of reaching a high potential.
- zht 5y agonot to mention a stable home life and parents who have the ability/time/resources to provide a kid an environment to be curious about this stuff
- dekhn 5y agoDoes 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.
- jboy55 5y agoMy 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.
- danachow 5y agoNo 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.
- samhw 5y ago> 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?
- mwcampbell 5y ago> No door is ever closed. You can do anything! This is obvious nonsense. Limitations are real, and I think it's better to be honest about them. Edit: I was wrong to post this shallow dismissal; see below.
- pcmoney 5y agoI agree but there is a self fulfilling aspect to thinking that way. It is better to believe anything is possible and be wrong than to impose limitations on ourselves. Most great accomplishments seem impossible at first.
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
- maybelsyrup 5y agoDamn, the courage it must've taken to scold a child on a internet website -- how did you summon it? Do you have a patreon I can donate to
- mwcampbell 5y agoFair point. It would have been better for me to keep silent and just let the thought pass.
- maybelsyrup 5y agoNow that's real courage. Sincere salute to owning your shit!
- citizenpaul 5y agoNo he didnt. These type of fake child genius articlea are harmful.