Category: Thoughts

Writing is thinking.

My Comment on California’s Reopening Plan

I rarely comment on social news or politics, but I just heard California is reopening its economy—people start gathering and dining in restaurants—while it keeps popping up 3K more COVID patients each day. I’m deeply concerned about the situation in the coming cold weather.

Maybe for economic reasons, people have to work to make a living. But if we do it in the same way as we did pre-COVID, we spent 6 months fighting the virus in vain.

People tend to forecast the trend of COVID transmission based on the stat chart. When the daily new case gets to a lower level, they cheer and vow for reopening.

But I hold a strong opinion that the visual trend on the chart is MEANINGLESS for forecast—for a virus-based pandemic, each day is DAY ONE. Whenever there is one active carrier on the street, the exponential growth could spark again.

Attached two screenshots from JHU’s stat site. Data from European countries have proven my opinion. Take the Netherlands as an example, in June, the Netherlands government believed the virus was in control and thus lifted bans allowing bars and restaurant to reopen. Then from the second half of June, we can see a surge in the infection (COVID has a latency period of 7–14 days). And it went way beyond the first wave.

Covid statistics chart of Netherlands, to September, 2020
Credit: JHU Coronavirus Resource Center, 09/2020
Covid statistics chart of California, to September, 2020
Credit: JHU Coronavirus Resource Center, 09/2020

So why California is so confident it’s the time to reopen? If they don’t care about the China experience, does it bother to take a look at Europe? Do Californians want to lock down again when the daily new case jumped to 25K?

A friend of mine’s parents who live in California were just diagnosed with COVID. I feel truly sad about it. And I genuinely hope the politician can prioritize people’s life and death beyond economic interest. Money only matters when people are living well!

Uncle Sam, please be consistent, please be resilient, please make prudent decisions for the sake of human life.

Postscript 01/07/2021

California COVID Chart Jan 7th, 2021
Credit: JHU Coronavirus Resource Center, 01/07/2021

Almost four months after the original post, California now books 40k new cases per day. 10x the level when they loosened the control.

Quick Thoughts On Assistive Technology


Just watched an independent documentary film called Between Sound and Silence on New York Times’ website. Before watching the film, I had never paid attention to the cochlear implant and never knew hearing impaired people could hear clearly with assistive technology. I come from a less-developed region in China. If people in my hometown were born with hearing disability, they might end up hearing nothing for life.

According to the documentary film and the post, I have identified following aspects that I would like to comment:

  1. Technology has significantly powered the improvement of human life quality. More than technologies that have surrounded our normal life like automobiles, smartphones, or microwave ovens, the integration of engineering capability and physiology research have given birth to medical solutions like the cochlear implant, radiofrequency ablation, 3D printed joints and so on that solve incurable diseases just decades ago.
  2. There are no absolute criteria to judge a product. This might be counter-intuitive for most of us to know not every hearing disabled person would like to hear again. An engineering solution usually has an impact on both functionality and social influence. The social significance is hard to predict until the solution being deployed. Similar phenomena can be seen in the P2P protocol being criticized for copyright infringement and Le Corbusier’s design of Unité d’Habitation being criticized in the 1950s for being “inhumane.”
  3. The product design can be more empathetic. The current design of cochlear implant is generally neutral and humble; this makes it easier for users to hide the device from being noticed. However, the stealthy design ignored the fact that some users would like their situation to be aware of by nearby people. In a paper on assistive technology’s social impact, by Kristen Shinohara and Jacob O. Wobbrock from the Information School at University of Washington, revealed the fact that some research participants purposefully used their devices to raise awareness of their situation for safety reasons—this echoes with some of the interviewees’ embarrassing moments shared in the documentary—people forgot they were deaf [1]. When designing a product, it’s usage scenario shall be considered thoroughly—not only the user and the product but also the physical and social/psychological environments—should be taken into account. The problem demonstrated by the paper and the documentary also makes me think what is missing to push the assistive technology product firms to consider beyond the current scope in the R&D process.

Reference

  1. Kristen S., Jacob W. (2011). In the Shadow of Misperception: Assistive Technology Use and Social Interactions. CHI 2011, May 7–12, 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Alexa, Who Are You — A Brief History of Amazon’s Voice Assistant and Beyond

In the 2nd Quarter of the MSTI program at Global Innovation Exchange, University of Washington, we had a course called the History and Future of Technology. The course aims to give us an understanding and appreciation of past trends in technology to understand the trajectories of technology and how they change over time. This paper was the piece of work for the final assignment. In the article, I explored the path of Amazon Echo/Alexa’s development, and its impact on the society.

Photo credit: Amazon PR
Photo credit: Amazon PR

Abstract

In 2015, the Seattle-based company Amazon released Amazon Echo, a voice command device that connects to the company’s voice-controlled virtual assistant service Alexa. This research paper will introduce the development path of Amazon Echo/Alexa—how was it conceived, what were the critical decisions made. As the voice-based-command product relatively belongs to a new category, its optimal research and development approach has not been well defined; Amazon initiated the Alexa Prize for university talents to challenge specific topics, we can have a glimpse into the crucial technical challenge in a conversation AI product through this competition. This paper will also cover the ecosystem of the voice-command service industry, its impact on the society, debates, and controversies around such services.

Keywords:  Amazon Alexa, conversational AI, natural language processing, machine learning, virtual assistant
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