The default TouchChat display of PRC-Saltillo’s communication device, for example, consists of 12 rows of eight buttons displaying a mix of letters, object icons (“apple”), category icons (“food”), and navigation elements (back arrows)—many of them in garish neon colors. Part of what I find infuriating about the interface is how it treats every button similarly—they’re all the same size, 200 by 200 pixels, and there’s no obvious logic to button placement, text size, or capitalization. Some words are oddly abbreviated (“DESCRB”) while others (“thank you”) are scaled down to fit the width of the box. The graphic for “cool” is a smiling stick figure giving a thumbs up; aside from the fact it’s redundant with “good” (a hand-only thumbs up), “yes,” and “like” (both smiley faces), what if the user means cool in temperature?
Established principles of information hierarchy and interface design for AAC devices aren’t standard—it’s up to Surabian to define the number and size of buttons on each screen, as well as icon size, type size, and whether a button’s position should change or remain fixed.
“Everything moves slowly because it has to be compatible with the past, which means if the past was kind of clunky, part of the present is kind of clunky too.”
Mark Surabian, AAC consultant
I’d called Surabian in hopes of being wowed. When he and I met up at a café in lower Manhattan, I got excited by the rolling briefcase by his side, thinking he might show me the coolest stuff happening in AAC. But I was again underwhelmed.
Because the reality is this: the last major advance in AAC technology happened 13 years ago, an eternity in technology time. On April 3, 2010, Steve Jobs debuted the iPad. What for most people was basically a more convenient form factor was something far more consequential for non-speakers: a life-changing revolution in access to an attractive, portable, and powerful communication device for just a few hundred dollars. Like smartphones, iPads had built-in touch screens, but with the key advantage of more space to display dozens of icon-based buttons on a single screen. And for the first time, AAC users could use the same device they used for speaking to do other things, like text, FaceTime, browse the web, watch movies, record audio, and share photos.
“School districts and parents were buying an iPad, bringing it to us, and saying ‘Make this work,’” wrote Heidi LoStracco and Renee Shevchenko, two Philadelphia-based speech and language pathologists who worked exclusively with non-speaking children. “It got to the point where someone was asking us for iPad applications for AAC every day. We would tell them, ‘There’s not really an effective AAC app out there yet, but when there is, we’ll be the first to tell you about it.’”
A piece of hardware, however impressively designed and engineered, is only as valuable as what a person can do with it. After the iPad’s release, the flood of new, easy-to-use AAC apps that LoStracco, Shevchenko, and their clients wanted never came.
Today, there are about a half-dozen apps, each retailing for $200 to $300, that rely on 30-year-old conventions asking users to select from menus of crudely drawn icons to produce text and synthesized speech. Beyond the high price point, most AAC apps require customization by a trained specialist to be useful. This could be the reason access remains a problem; LoStracco and Shevchenko claim that only 10% of non-speaking people in the US are using the technology. (AAC Counts, a project of CommunicationFIRST, a national advocacy organization for people with speech disabilities, recently highlighted the need for better data about AAC users.)
On the NovaChat communication device’s default TouchChat display, all the buttons are the same size, and there’s no obvious logic to button placement, text size, or capitalization.
There aren’t many other options available, though the possibilities do depend on the abilities of the user. Literate non-speakers with full motor control of their arms, hands, and fingers, for example, can use readily available text-to-speech software on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop or laptop computer. Those whose fine motor control is limited can also use these applications with the assistance of an eye-controlled laser pointer, a physical pointer attached to their head, or another person to help them operate a touch screen, mouse, or keyboard. The options dwindle for pre-literate and cognitively impaired users who communicate with picture-based vocabularies. For my daughter, I was briefly intrigued by a “mid-tech” option—the Logan ProxTalker, a 13-inch console with a built-in speaker and a kit of RFID-enabled sound tags. One of five stations on the console recognizes the tags, each pre-programmed to speak its unique icon. But then I saw its price—$3,000 for 140 tags. (For context, the National Institutes of Health estimates that the average five-year-old can recognize over 10,000 words.)
The first step to finding out is to catalogue what microbes we might have lost. To get as close to ancient microbiomes as possible, microbiologists have begun studying multiple Indigenous groups. Two have received the most attention: the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest and the Hadza, in northern Tanzania.
Researchers have made some startling discoveries already. A study by Sonnenburg and his colleagues, published in July, found that the gut microbiomes of the Hadza appear to include bugs that aren’t seen elsewhere—around 20% of the microbe genomes identified had not been recorded in a global catalogue of over 200,000 such genomes. The researchers found 8.4 million protein families in the guts of the 167 Hadza people they studied. Over half of them had not previously been identified in the human gut.
Plenty of other studies published in the last decade or so have helped build a picture of how the diets and lifestyles of hunter-gatherer societies influence the microbiome, and scientists have speculated on what this means for those living in more industrialized societies. But these revelations have come at a price.
A changing way of life
The Hadza people hunt wild animals and forage for fruit and honey. “We still live the ancient way of life, with arrows and old knives,” says Mangola, who works with the Olanakwe Community Fund to support education and economic projects for the Hadza. Hunters seek out food in the bush, which might include baboons, vervet monkeys, guinea fowl, kudu, porcupines, or dik-dik. Gatherers collect fruits, vegetables, and honey.
Mangola, who has met with multiple scientists over the years and participated in many research projects, has witnessed firsthand the impact of such research on his community. Much of it has been positive. But not all researchers act thoughtfully and ethically, he says, and some have exploited or harmed the community.
One enduring problem, says Mangola, is that scientists have tended to come and study the Hadza without properly explaining their research or their results. They arrive from Europe or the US, accompanied by guides, and collect feces, blood, hair, and other biological samples. Often, the people giving up these samples don’t know what they will be used for, says Mangola. Scientists get their results and publish them without returning to share them. “You tell the world [what you’ve discovered]—why can’t you come back to Tanzania to tell the Hadza?” asks Mangola. “It would bring meaning and excitement to the community,” he says.
Some scientists have talked about the Hadza as if they were living fossils, says Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist and biologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, who has been studying and working with the Hadza for the last two decades.
The Hadza have been described as being “locked in time,” she adds, but characterizations like that don’t reflect reality. She has made many trips to Tanzania and seen for herself how life has changed. Tourists flock to the region. Roads have been built. Charities have helped the Hadza secure land rights. Mangola went abroad for his education: he has a law degree and a master’s from the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona.
Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.
Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share. They’ve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost.
But there is a major catch: we don’t know whether those in hunter-gatherer societies really do have “healthier” microbiomes—and if they do, whether the benefits could be shared with others. At the same time, members of the communities being studied are concerned about the risk of what’s called biopiracy—taking natural resources from poorer countries for the benefit of wealthier ones. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation
—by Eric Schmidt, formerly the CEO of Google, and current cofounder of philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures
The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.
Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans to invest in and leverage the technology’s capabilities. In a study titled “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI,” Corinium Intelligence and WNS Triange surveyed 100 global C-suite leaders and decision-makers specializing in AI, analytics, and data. Seventy-six percent of the respondents said that their organizations are already using or planning to use generative AI.
According to McKinsey, while generative AI will affect most business functions, “four of them will likely account for 75% of the total annual value it can deliver.” Among these are marketing and sales and customer operations. Yet, despite the technology’s benefits, many leaders are unsure about the right approach to take and mindful of the risks associated with large investments.
Mapping out a generative AI pathway
One of the first challenges organizations need to overcome is senior leadership alignment. “You need the necessary strategy; you need the ability to have the necessary buy-in of people,” says Ayer. “You need to make sure that you’ve got the right use case and business case for each one of them.” In other words, a clearly defined roadmap and precise business objectives are as crucial as understanding whether a process is amenable to the use of generative AI.
The implementation of a generative AI strategy can take time. According to Ayer, business leaders should maintain a realistic perspective on the duration required for formulating a strategy, conduct necessary training across various teams and functions, and identify the areas of value addition. And for any generative AI deployment to work seamlessly, the right data ecosystems must be in place.
Ayer cites WNS Triange’s collaboration with an insurer to create a claims process by leveraging generative AI. Thanks to the new technology, the insurer can immediately assess the severity of a vehicle’s damage from an accident and make a claims recommendation based on the unstructured data provided by the client. “Because this can be immediately assessed by a surveyor and they can reach a recommendation quickly, this instantly improves the insurer’s ability to satisfy their policyholders and reduce the claims processing time,” Ayer explains.
All that, however, would not be possible without data on past claims history, repair costs, transaction data, and other necessary data sets to extract clear value from generative AI analysis. “Be very clear about data sufficiency. Don’t jump into a program where eventually you realize you don’t have the necessary data,” Ayer says.
The benefits of third-party experience
Enterprises are increasingly aware that they must embrace generative AI, but knowing where to begin is another thing. “You start off wanting to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes other people have made,” says Ayer. An external provider can help organizations avoid those mistakes and leverage best practices and frameworks for testing and defining explainability and benchmarks for return on investment (ROI).
Using pre-built solutions by external partners can expedite time to market and increase a generative AI program’s value. These solutions can harness pre-built industry-specific generative AI platforms to accelerate deployment. “Generative AI programs can be extremely complicated,” Ayer points out. “There are a lot of infrastructure requirements, touch points with customers, and internal regulations. Organizations will also have to consider using pre-built solutions to accelerate speed to value. Third-party service providers bring the expertise of having an integrated approach to all these elements.”
