Facebook announced that with a team
of 60 engineers, social media giant is working to build brain-computer interface
that allows you to type with just your mind without invasive implants. The team
plans to implement optical imaging to scan your brain a hundred times per
second to detect you speaking quietly in your head and translate it into text.
Regina Dugan, the head of Facebook’s
R&D division Building 8, shared more details to the members of conference that
the aim is to allow people to type at 100 words per minute, 5X faster than
typing on a phone, with mind alone.
“What if you could type directly from
your brain?” Chief of Facebook R&D says. She demonstrated a video of a
paralyzed patient at Stanford who can type using mind with an implanted sensor.
Chief also explained how Facebook wants to move ahead without the use of
surgical implants.
While the work in Building 8 had only
begun working on the brain typing project six months ago, it is now
collaborating with UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins Medicine,
Washington University School of Medicine in St.Louis and Johns Hopkins
University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Researchers who are specialized in
machine learning for decoding speech and language, building optical
neuroimaging systems with advanced structural resolution and next-generation
neural prosthetics are participating.
The program calls for to
significantly build non-implanted devices that can ship in a large proportion.
Facebook also says “This isn’t about decoding random thoughts. This is about
decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending
them to the speech center of your brain.” Further, Facebook confirms that you’ll
be able to think at liberty but only convert few thoughts into text.
Alternatively, Building 8 is also
working for human to be able to hear through their skin. Collecting prototypes
of hardware and software that allows impression the cochlea in your car that translates
sound into specific frequencies in your brain. This technology could enable deaf
people with “hear” by bypassing their ears.
Facebook engineer team is
experimenting with hearing through skin with the medium of system of actuators
tuned to 16 frequency bands. A test subject was ready to develop a diction of
nine words they could hear through their skin.
According to job listings, Facebook
is looking for a “Brain-Computer Interface Engineer” who will have
responsibility for working on a 2-year B8 project emphasizing on development
BCI technologies. Job tasks include “Application of machine learning methods,
including encoding and decoding models, to neuroimaging and
electrophysiological data.” The company is also looking for a Neural Imaging
Engineer who will be “focused on
developing novel non-invasive neuroimaging technologies” who has to “Design and
evaluate novel neural imaging methods based on optical, RF, ultrasound, or
other entirely non-invasive approaches.”
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