By February 18, 2005
A computer program that translates pixels of digital computer images into musical notes has been a critical tool in the research efforts of Victor Kai-Chiu Wong grad, electrical and computer engineering. With a little over a semester of testing, the program has allowed Wong, who has been blind since the age of seven, to quickly interpret photographs and other graphical data of upper atmospheric phenomena, the focus of much of his research. “[The software] converts the actual pixel information in an image into sound,” said engineering student Ankur Moitra ’07, the author of the program. With the use of a Wacom tablet and stylus, a device similar to a mouse that associates positions on a computer screen to points on a tablet, Moitra’s program translates the color of a point on the screen into a musical note. “We used the sound, a pitch of the piano – that way we could actually explore a three-dimensional figure,” Wong said. For instance, during Wong’s inspection of upper atmospheric emissions, the color dimension allowed Wong to gather crucial information about the wavelength and intensity of the emitted radiation – information that for visible light is relayed through color and brightness and for invisible light is often converted to color for interpretation. “These [emission] lines … come from the transition of the state of molecules and atoms,” Wong said. The wavelengths provided information about the chemical makeup of the upper atmosphere, while the perturbations in intensity implied changes in “certain parameters such as electron density,” Wong added. Collectively, the data provided Wong with knowledge of the current state of the high-altitude weather surrounding the earth, which affects communication, the Global Positioning System and even radio broadcasting. The work on the software began this past summer, when other techniques of translating visual data for Wong became too difficult and time-consuming. “We started with the basic research question of how to represent a detailed color-scaled image to someone who is blind,” said research associate James Ferwerda in a press release. “The most natural approach was to try sound, since color and pitch can be directly related and sensitivity to changes in pitch is quite good,” Ferwerda added. Nonetheless, when writing the program, Moitra faced other conceptual and technical challenges. “It [was] very difficult to determine the edge of the image, and that is the first thing you want to determine,” Moitra said. The problem was solved through the use of an “advanced edge-detection algorithm” that prints out a three-dimensional copy of the image’s edge. That copy could then be overlayed on the tablet, so that Wong could feel the outlines of an image. A second challenge arose from the need to simplify the copious amounts of data that are encoded in extremely high-resolution images. “Oftentimes it is more beneficial to get a less fine resolution,” Moitra said. Accordingly, the translating software reduces the number of points, but retains most of image’s information through a process called a Gaussian blur. “What you actually do is average the points around so that it gives you more of a smooth feel,” Moitra explained. Wong’s success with the program thus far has inspired many ideas for improving the software. For instance, “we are trying to get a pattern recognition done – have the software automatically scan for major features of an image,” Wong explained. Currently, despite the benefits of the Gaussian Blur, Wong has to explore an image point by point to identify its major features. “If there are lots of data and the data are complex, this process [can] be very time consuming,” Wong said. However, with pattern recognition, the translating program would be able to identify large blobs of a single color and provide the user with a faster global interpretation of an image. Archived article by David Andrade Sun Staff Writer
By February 18, 2005
A transcript of Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers’ controversial speech at a economics conference last month was released yesterday following a month-long furor over his remarks about women in science. Although the phrase “innate differences” was not used, Summers’ speculations in the transcript on the reason for a scarcity of female scientists at top universities correlate to previous accounts of the speech. “So my best guess, to provoke you … [is] in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination,” Summers is recorded as saying at the National Bureau of Economics Research conference on Jan. 14. Earlier in the transcript, Summers had addressed hiring practices at universities: “If there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that.” Summers explicitly stated his desire to be proven wrong on these points. “I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them,” he said. The release of the nearly 7,000-word document came after Summers faced intense pressure at a faculty of arts and sciences meeting on Tuesday to publicize its contents. Many of the approximately 250 Harvard professors who attended the meeting also criticized Summers for Harvard’s direction under his leadership. According to The Crimson, many Harvard professors viewed Summers’ remarks as the last straw in a growing list of grievances. “It’s not simply a matter of that one comment or this particular issue,” Harvard’s history department chair Andrew Gordon told The Crimson. “There’s widespread discontent at multiple levels … catalyzed by this one event.” Part of that discontent stems from Harvard’s declining percentage of female tenures, which under Summers fell from 36 percent in 2000-2001 to 13 percent last year. The fire he drew for his remarks last month has hastened Summers’ response to the concern surrounding female tenures. About three weeks after the economics conference, Summers and other top administrators at Harvard unveiled a plan for creating two new faculty task forces to recommend actions for the advancement of women. The plan also called for a senior administrator to carry out those recommendations. Five days following the conference, Summers also issued a formal letter of apology for his remarks. A day later, he met with the Faculty Standing Committee on Women to express his regret. “I made a big mistake, and I was wrong,” he told the committee. Reactions at Cornell Faculty and students expressed disbelief at the remarks Summers made, especially in light of his position as a top university president. “I thought he was very misinformed,” said Prof. Melissa Hines, chemistry and chemical biology. “I couldn’t believe someone who was president of a major university held that opinion.” For Jamie Gullen ’07, the opinion carried little weight. The co-president of Students Acting for Gender Equality described Summers’s comment as “so clearly not backed up by research … that it’s hard to even take it seriously.” Prof. Stephen Morgan, sociology, used the incident in his class, “SOC222: Controversies about Inequality” as “an example of a set of comments that can be (and almost certainly should be) interpreted as discriminatory.” “I believe I said something to the effect of: ‘If I was a female scientist, and I was coming up for my tenure review at Harvard, I would be very concerned that President Summers might my harbor inner thoughts that my work was less meritorious simply because it was produced by a woman,”‘ Morgan stated in an email. Morgan, who is also Director of the Center for the Study of Inequality, acknowledged his surprise at Summers’ speech. “He did not seem to be sufficiently aware of the compelling evidence against his statement,” he said. The storm Summers battles now did not come as a shock to Dir. Joel Brock, applied and engineering physics. “I thought he was going to get in a lot of trouble,” Brock said after learning about Summers’ remarks. Several, however, feel that the month-long furor has generated some positive effects. “When I saw how everyone got so riled up, it was actually a good thing that it was brought to light,” said Kate Bakey ’05, president of Women in Science at Cornell, in reference to Summers’ words. Urging female science students not to be discouraged by the president’s remarks, Bakey said, “I think the most proactive way to deal with it is to take it as a challenge.” For Prof. Joanne Fortune, biomedical sciences and feminist, gender and sexuality studies, the controversy has affirmed the relevance of her course, “BIOAP214: Biological Basis of Sex Differences.” “Before this semester started, I was wondering, is this course on sex differences something that students would be interested in, or did they think that problems of gender bias had been solved?” Fortune said. “President Summers’ remarks helped to highlight that we still have a ways to go in providing equal opportunity.” After bringing up the Summers controversy in her “SOC270 Gender: Meaning & Practices” class, Prof. Shelley Correll, sociology, presented a more drastic case of gender discrimination in the last century. “Early in the 1900s a Harvard professor suggested that the reason there were so few women at Harvard and other colleges was that their brains were too small to handle the pressures of college,” Correll wrote in an email recalling her lecture. “Since over half of all college students are now women, we can see how wrong he was.” “I think time will prove Summers equally as wrong,” she stated. Archived article by Xiaowei Cathy TangSun Staff Writer