“Medicine has not been able to cure me, so I depend on technology to communicate and to live,” said Professor Stephen Hawking on Tuesday December 2, 2014 in London at the presentation of the new chair that Intel engineers had created him. It took three years of work, up to that moment, for the British scientist to communicate with the rest of the world up to ten times faster than he had done before, also with another system produced by the same American company.
With the new chair, Hawking’s cheek sensor was detected by an infrared switch mounted on his glasses, allowing him to select characters on his computer. The integration of the linguistic software technology of the British company SwiftKey, a predictive text app , improved the system’s ability to learn from the teacher, predicting their next characters and words.
For two years, Swiftkey engineers worked on a custom language model for Hawking, similar to the application that many mobile phones currently integrate. The system learns from what the user has already written in emails, messages or post on social networks to anticipate the words.
According to Intel, with this system Hawking only had to write less than 20% of the total of the communicated characters. Until the introduction of the new system, to perform a simple web search, Professor Hawking had to close his communication window, move the pointer to launch his browser, move it back to the search bar, and type the search terms. The new system introduced in London at the end of 2014 automated all these steps.
The old system used by the British scientist who died yesterday was like “trying to use modern applications and web pages without having a keyboard or mouse,” said Wen-Hann Wang, vice president of Intel and CEO of Intel Labs.
Today this system known as the Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT) is available to the more than three million people in the world who suffer from the same disease that ended the life of Stephen Hawking at the age of 76. Thanks to ACAT, and tools that are used today in the field of artificial intelligence, the British professor was able to communicate to the world many of his theories, thoughts and scientific studies, including his theories of the Big Bang and black holes.
