Upgrading Humans

3:30 PM
imtracynotstacy: hi Desney

yensed: Hey Tracy, how's it going.

imtracynotstacy: It's going well.

yensed: Cool.
3:32 PM

imtracynotstacy: thanks for taking this time for me

yensed: No problem... This is a fun medium.

imtracynotstacy: So. I'd like to start out by just asking where you are. What city?

yensed: I'm in Redmond right now, in my office here....
Redmond, WA.

imtracynotstacy: And could you describe your work for me....in 10 words or less? (keeping with the spirit of IM)
3:35 PM

yensed: 10 words? Oops, I just used them up...

imtracynotstacy: try again, please :)

yensed: I see myself as working hard to upgrade humans. Augment ourselves with technology, if you will.

imtracynotstacy: and what tools do you use to do that?
or maybe I should ask, what technologies?

yensed: Well, we believe that there is a lot of potential to be harvested from interfacing directly with the human physiology... So we've done a lot of work with brain-computer interfaces, using brain-sensing devices to infer what's going on in our brains, which can be pretty useful in a variety of situations.
3:36 PM
We've also done quite a bit sensing muscles, and other parts of the body.
Many of the technologies we use utilize very simple electromagnetic sensing, since the human body is a pretty prolific generator of these signals.
3:37 PM

imtracynotstacy: do you conduct your work from your office? Or do you also have a lab?

yensed: We have quite a few resources here... Much of it, we do in the office, some in labs around the company. We also collaborate a lot with academic institutes and do a lot of work remotely too.

imtracynotstacy: the stuff you are talking about sounds very cyborg-ish
3:40 PM
upgrading humans and all

yensed: Yes, I would claim we are already "cyborgs" (in your terms). We've spent a good deal of our history crafting technology augmentations to ourselves... Language (both spoken and written), and more recently, computers, cell phones, etc.

imtracynotstacy: yes, lots of people have their cell phones attached to their heads, so to speak

yensed: I'm very influenced by the Distributed Cognition movement, which proposes that in order to understand the human and human cognition, we have to understand ourselves in the context of our environments.
3:43 PM

imtracynotstacy: how do you want to upgrade humans?
and why?

yensed: Well, I'd like for the computer-human interface to become much more natural than it currently is. We can still (mostly) tell the boundary between computer and human, and I believe this makes the overall system less effective than it could be. I think when the two systems become seamlessly integrated we will start to hit the potential of computing.

imtracynotstacy: What do you mean "much more natural?"

yensed: For example, with the brain-computer interface work, one thing we'd like to do is to provide a method for a computer to better understand the current state of humans so that it can act appropriately.

imtracynotstacy: could you give me an example of an application for a computer that can understand the state of a human?

yensed: Right now, my machine has no idea that I'm in a conversation (even though it should). It doesn't know I'm thinking really hard (yes, I am) to answer your great questions. E-mail just came in in the other window and interrupted me for a sec. My machine should've known better.
3:45 PM

imtracynotstacy: and what would a machine do with that knowledge, if it knew?

yensed: Interruption mediation based on my mental state is just the start of things. We know that interruptions are highly costly, and we can avoid them, but fixing existing problems is only half the fun... Imagine if the computer could help me absorb/process more information because it knew more about me, or more about my current mental state. Wouldn't that be nice?

imtracynotstacy: sort of like a personal assistant that can read your mind?

yensed: Yep, you could say that.
3:48 PM

imtracynotstacy: okay, so how do you get to that stage?

yensed: Well, currently, we hook people up to brain-sensing devices such as Electroencephalographs (EEG) that sense voltages on the scalp. These are pretty good indicators of activity in the brain.
The readings are really noisy though, since the brain is quite complex, and the signal has to come through your skull and scalp. So we have to use quite a bit of computational power to process the signals and make sense of it all.

imtracynotstacy: and what activity are you seeing?
sensing?

yensed: We have shown that, even with fairly low-end equipment (which is important cause we'd like this to be useful to the masses), we can sense different mental activities (e.g. doing math in your head vs. thinking of objects vs. doing nothing).
3:50 PM
We've also shown we can measure/infer how hard you're thinking... This is important if you want to know how hard a task is (e.g. using a new interface or doing a new task), so that we can design our systems appropriately.

imtracynotstacy: so my computer could possibly tell the difference between when I'm doing nothing and when I'm typing or thinking, right?

yensed: Yep.
We can do that, even if there are few external cues (if there are external cues, we could sense those too, without brain gear).

imtracynotstacy: why did you get into this kind of work?

yensed: Have always been interested in the human brain/body, and have always been interested in computing (which is what I'm formally trained in). I think there's opportunity for very large impact in this space. Also, I like working on problems that people call impossible (or at least difficult), and hooking technology up to brain and body certainly fall into that category of stuff.
I'm also a little of a sci-fi geek I guess, and what better way to spend my time than creating some of the fantasy.
3:52 PM

imtracynotstacy: If you could let your sci-fi imagination run wild, what could you hope/dream might become of this area of research? And then what is the reality?

yensed: It's all reality, or can be.
I think that a much better understanding both of ourselves (physiologically as well as philosophically), but also the knowledge of how to leverage that understanding and increase our effectiveness at operating within the world.
3:55 PM

imtracynotstacy: could you give me a concrete example of a possibility of this technology?

yensed: I love a bunch of the work being done with prosthetics for example.
Lose an arm? We can graft a robotic one on, rewire some of the nerves (or brain) and you're good to go, mostly anyways.
Amazing stuff.

imtracynotstacy: What do you imagine this technology could offer?
3:58 PM

yensed: Now, I talk about the 3 stages of media (since I came out of lab at CMU called Stage 3).
Stage 1: show proof of concept that it works at all.
Stage 2: Emulate existing technologies (or capabilities)
Stage 3: Do new stuff with the technology.
We're in Stage 2 with prosthetics, but imagine when we start giving healthy people a third arm.
Or forth or fifth.
4:00 PM
How do we change our humaness (humanity)?

imtracynotstacy: wow. talk about augmentation!

yensed: It takes a little creativity to get into Stage 3, but oftentimes, that leads to massive changes (and improvements) to the way we live.

imtracynotstacy: yeah, but having a mobile phone that downloads stream video for example is nothing compared to a third arm...I mean, that feels like....I dunno...evolution

yensed: Maybe. But have you seen all the great stuff that mobile phones are enabling in the developing world?
Medical care, business/commerce, education... No less impressive than my third arm.
4:02 PM

imtracynotstacy: okay.....good point
so where do you get your inspiration?

yensed: Everywhere.

imtracynotstacy: like?

yensed: Everytime someone says "I wish I could...." that inspires me.

imtracynotstacy: when's the last time someone said that?