A University of Washington team has developed an artificial intelligence system that lets a user wearing headphones look at a person speaking for three to five seconds to “enroll” them. The system, called “Target Speech Hearing,” then cancels all other sounds in the environment and plays just the enrolled speaker’s voice in real time even as the listener moves around in noisy places and no longer faces the speaker.

The team presented its findings May 14 in Honolulu at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The code for the proof-of-concept device is available for others to build on. The system is not commercially available.

“We tend to think of AI now as web-based chatbots that answer questions,” said senior author Shyam Gollakota, a UW professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “But in this project, we develop AI to modify the auditory perception of anyone wearing headphones, given their preferences. With our devices you can now hear a single speaker clearly even if you are in a noisy environment with lots of other people talking.”

To use the system, a person wearing off-the-shelf headphones fitted with microphones taps a button while directing their head at someone talking. The sound waves from that speaker’s voice then should reach the microphones on both sides of the headset simultaneously; there’s a 16-degree margin of error. The headphones send that signal to an on-board embedded computer, where the team’s machine learning software learns the desired speaker’s vocal patterns. The system latches onto that speaker’s voice and continues to play it back to the listener, even as the pair moves around. The system’s ability to focus on the enrolled voice improves as the speaker keeps talking, giving the system more training data.

Related:

• For more information, see the team’s website
• Stories from MIT Technology Review and GeekWire

The team tested its system on 21 subjects, who rated the clarity of the enrolled speaker’s voice nearly twice as high as the unfiltered audio on average.

This work builds on the team’s previous “semantic hearing” research, which allowed users to select specific sound classes — such as birds or voices — that they wanted to hear and canceled other sounds in the environment.

Currently the TSH system can enroll only one speaker at a time, and it’s only able to enroll a speaker when there is not another loud voice coming from the same direction as the target speaker’s voice. If a user isn’t happy with the sound quality, they can run another enrollment on the speaker to improve the clarity.

The team is working to expand the system to earbuds and hearing aids in the future.

Additional co-authors on the paper were Bandhav Veluri, Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen, UW doctoral students in the Allen School, and Takuya Yoshioka, director of research at AssemblyAI. This research was funded by a Moore Inventor Fellow award, a Thomas J. Cabel Endowed Professorship and a UW CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund.

For more information, contact tsh@cs.washington.edu.

This live interview includes an excerpt from another exclusive, extended conversation recorded a few days earlier at Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory. Watch that full video here: https://youtu.be/YRvf00NooN8

1:22 Tesla Texas Gigafactory interview clip
11:34 Elon Musk live at TED2022
11:48 Twitter, free speech and open-sourcing the algorithm
27:40 Tesla and short sellers
32:02 If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?
33:44 Electric vehicles, manufacturing and sleeping on the floor of the Tesla factory
38:04 “At this point I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth.”
39:15 Elon’s “Master Plan” and accelerating a sustainable energy economy
42:36 SNL, Asperger’s, childhood and how Elon’s brain works
46:48 “I was absolutely obsessed with truth.”
49:23 Philosophy, the meaning of life and the “why” of things
51:43 What the future will look like
52:37 “We want to do our absolute best to make sure the future is … something you can look forward to and not feel sad about.”

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Costa Rica is pioneering the future of running on renewable energy and may be the model for future countries to follow suit.

In the last four years, Costa Rica has generated 98.53% of its electricity from renewable sources. 

How? With its unique geography, forward thinking solutions, and commitment to sustainability, Costa Rica has used its rivers, volcanoes, wind, and solar power to generate its country’s power.

By the year 2021, Costa Rica plans to be completely carbon-neutral.

Since they’ve already operated on only renewable energy (much more difficult than simply being ‘carbon-neutral) for the majority of the last few years, it is definitely feasible.

Carbon Neutral vs 100% Renewable Energy

Before we get too deep in this, let’s have a firm understanding of the difference between what is considered ‘carbon-neutral’ and ‘100% renewable.’

Here is the definition of carbon neutrality:  

In other words, a country can be considered carbon neutral while still using fossil fuels by planting trees that offset the carbon, or funding conservation programs which aim to reduce the amount of carbon in the air.

A country using 100% renewable energy, however, is the process using sources of energy that will never run out. In other words, no fossil fuels.

In addition, any carbon the country does use, it intends to offset through different initiatives. 

Costa Rica: Leading the world in carbon neutrality

For several years now, Costa Rica has run on entirely renewable energy for an average of about 300 days per year. 

That means the government did not burn any oil, coal, or natural gas to power the country.

No other country this size has done this. 

For example, Portugal was recently praised in the news for running on 100% renewables for 4 days. Which is amazing, but also a testament to Costa Rica’s amazing progress.

Here’s how Costa Rica powers their country with renewable electricity

Costa Rica invested early in the power of renewable energy resources and made it a priority to become environmentally sustainable.

Because of that, the country has an abundance of geothermal renewable sources that account for much of the necessary energy to make the country successfully function.

Also, Costa Rica can get a lot of rain. With consistent rainfall, their hydroelectric plants can produce a plethora of energy.

Lastly, the population is small and their workforce is not manufacturing intensive, which means their energy requirements are not as large as some countries.

The future of renewable energy in Costa Rica

Costa Rica has been focused on environmental sustainability from the outset, and they are working hard to keep it a priority in the future. Here is what is in store.

Recently approved to be built, Costa Rica is constructing THREE 50 MW geothermal power plants costing $954 million. It should be known, this is no cheap investment…especially for a small country that is 50th in GDP.

However, the country is taking advantage of their dozen volcanoes (5 of which are active) and investing in the future by showing the world they stand for environmental sustainability.

But it doesn’t stop there.  Costa Rica is also unveiling a 305.5 MW hydroelectric plant that is set to power over half a million homes…which is A LOT, considering there are less than 5 million people in the entire country.

What do you think?

How do you feel about investing in renewable energy?

Written by: Miles Rote – under30experiences.com

Heroes in a half shell

A new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game is on the way – and by the looks of it, it’s bound to please fans of 1991’s classic side-scrolling beat ‘em up, Turtles in Time.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge will be published by Dotemu, the team behind the excellent recent release of Streets of Rage 4, and is being developed by Tribute Games, who house key talent that worked on the acclaimed Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game. 

You can check out the trailer below, which is sure to tug on the heart strings of older games and those who grew up watching the animated series. The signature Turtle’s anthem is also sung by Faith No More’s Mike Patton, which again, probably won’t mean much to anyone under the age of thirty.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge reunites Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello as they tour iconic TMNT locations, thumping the Foot-Clan along the way. You’ll need to use the pizza-loving turtles shell-shocking abilities and brawling prowess to thwart familiar nemeses like Bebop and Rocksteady from executing their dastardly plans.

Cowabunga, dudes!

The game features a pixel art world and is directly inspired by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time. That means you can expect plenty of satisfying side-scrolling action, some couch co-op and a cowabunga or two from the turtles themselves.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is coming to consoles and PC, so we’d expect it to see it arrive on PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and Nintendo Switch, as well as last-gen systems.

It’s comforting to know that such a classic franchise is in good hands, with Dotemu known for their excellent handling of beloved retro games like Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap and Streets of Rage 4. It’s unlikely this new TMNT game will Splinter the series’ loyal audience, then. (Sorry.)

Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite-based internet provider, will double in speed “later this year”, according to a tweet by Elon Musk, posted as a reply to someone who had just received their Starlink beta kit (via CNET). The company currently promises speeds between 50 to 150Mbps, and Musk specifically calls out a 300Mbps goal in his tweet. 

While 300Mbps isn’t unheard-of speed, it’s faster than many people currently have access to, especially in the low-to-medium population density areas that Musk talks about targeting in a second tweet. 

In the reply, Elon also tells the person that their latency should improve to around 20ms as well. In the speed test screenshots, their latency was at 34 and 44ms respectively, while Starlink’s website says to expect between 20 and 40ms during the beta. 

The speed increase and latency improvements should come as a nice surprise to anyone who put down a $100 Starlink pre-order. However, it’s well known that Elon’s promises about the future should be taken with a grain of salt, especially if they’re about timelines. Still, this shows that SpaceX is looking to speed up Starlink, and it might be able to keep pace with what’s available from a copper wire running to your house.

By Bijan Stephen  Feb 19, 2021, 12:45pm EST

Yesterday, NASA landed a rover named Perseverance on Mars. I, along with 2 million other people, watched the landing happen live on YouTube. It was beautiful. I mean, here’s this little robot dude that’s traveled millions and millions of miles through the barrenness of space, and now it’s just hanging out on Mars taking pics and scientific samples! (Perseverance joins older sibling Curiosity on the surface of the Red Planet. Hope they have a nice time together!) 

In any case, Perseverance didn’t traverse the vastness of space alone. Ingenuity, a tiny helicopter, tagged along for the ride. As it’s primarily a technology demonstration, Ingenuity’s destiny is to attempt the first powered flight on any planet other than Earth and to hopefully be the blueprint for future Mars missions. It’s also running on Linux. 

“This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars,” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) senior engineer Tim Canham said in an interview with the the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). “The software framework that we’re using is one that we developed at JPL for cubesats and instruments, and we open-sourced it a few years ago.” It’s called F’ (pronounced “F prime”). The fact that it’s open source means if you want to fly with Linux here on Earth using the same software JPL does, you absolutely can. 

“It’s kind of an open-source victory, because we’re flying an open-source operating system and an open-source flight software framework and flying commercial parts that you can buy off the shelf if you wanted to do this yourself someday,” Canham said.

Great stuff. It’s cool that Perseverance, Curiosity, and Ingenuity have all found a new home on the surface Mars. Though I still think it’s cooler that space is pretty obviously inhospitable to human life, and yet we still put people up there anyway.

By Chaim Gartenberg@cgartenberg  Mar 2, 2021, 2:57pm EST

NASA’s brand-new Perseverance rover is the most advanced machine that’s ever landed on Mars. But when it comes to rovers, “state of the art” is a subjective term. Perseverance is running on none other than a PowerPC 750, a single-core, 233MHz processor with just 6 million transistors that’s most famous for powering the original “Bondi blue” iMac from 1998. It’s the same type of processor that NASA already uses in its Curiosity rover. 

That may seem like a waste to some. After all, even with the difficulty of buying computer parts these days, surely NASA could have found the budget for something like Intel’s $500 Core i9-10900K CPU (with 10 cores and a max clock speed of 5.3GHz) somewhere in the $2.7 billion cost of Perseverance. But as New Scientist explains, such an advanced chip is actually a detriment to the unique operating conditions of Mars.

That’s largely because Mars’ atmosphere offers far less protection from harmful radiation and charged particles than Earth’s atmosphere. A bad burst of radiation can badly wreck the sensitive electronics of a modern processor — and the more complex the chip, the more can go wrong. Plus, at 138 million miles away, it’s not like NASA can just swap out the processor if things go sideways. Because of those conditions, Perseverance actually features two computing modules: one is a backup just in case something goes wrong. (A third copy of the module is also on board for image analysis.)

To make the system even more durable, the PowerPC 750 chip in Perseverance is a little different than the one in the old iMacs. It’s technically a RAD750 chip, a special variant that’s hardened against radiation and costs upwards of $200,000. The chip is popular for spacecraft, too: in addition to Perseverance and Curiosity, it also powers the Fermi Space Telescope, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Deep Impact comet-hunting spacecraft, and the Kepler telescope, among others. 

While the processor may be weak compared to a modern smartphone or gaming PC, NASA’s spec sheet for Perseverance notes that it’s far more powerful than earlier rovers like Spirit or Opportunity: its 200MHz clock speed is 10 times faster than those older rovers, and with 2GB of flash memory, it offers eight times the storage. (Rounding things out, Perseverance also has 256MB of RAM in case you were looking to build your own rover.)

But while the chip itself has been to Mars before, Perseverance features some new computer technology that’s debuting on the planet for the first time: Linux, which powers the Ingenuity helicopter that will attempt to fly autonomously on Mars as part of Perseverance’s mission.

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