By Jeané Blunt. The University of California is the world’s leading public research university system. Our students, faculty, staff and alumni exchange ideas, make advancements and unlock the secrets and mysteries of the universe every day.
It’s no wonder that the UC IT community is constantly making headlines. Here are a few recent stories featuring our UC IT family:
Tech can sift through video evidence…but can it avoid bias?
With cell phones, security cameras, drones, and the emergence of doorbell cameras, law enforcement has been inundated with video evidence in recent years. Analyzing all that information is no easy feat, so law enforcement is developing algorithms to process this information. Kelly Gates, associate professor at UC San Diego, studied the rise of forensic video evidence. She sat down with Molly Wood of Marketplace to discuss the issues facing law enforcement when it comes to sifting through video.
Turning Brain Activity into Speech through Artificial Intelligence
The ability to speak and communicate our thoughts is something most of us take for granted. For many people who are paralyzed and unable to speak, indicators of what they’d like to say are hidden in their brains. No one has been able to decipher those signals directly, but neurosurgeon Edward Chang and his team at UC San Francisco recently reconstructed entire sentences from brain activity captured from speech and motor areas while three epilepsy patients read aloud. Read all about this recent breakthrough in Science.
A Pacemaker in the Brain could help patients with Epilepsy and Parkinsons
Engineers and researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a device called WAND that stands for, “wireless artifact-free neuromodulation device.” This device can act as a pacemaker within the human brain. It can also detect electrical currents in the brain and deliver stimulation into the brain. This type of neurological stimulation could help patients with epilepsy and Parkinsonism. You can read about WAND in News Medical and you can read about the results of experiments using WAND in Nature Biomedical Engineering.