blind

Start-up Aira raises $12M, showing the way for cognitive science and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the lives of blind and low vision individuals

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Aira Rais­es $12M Series B Financ­ing Led By JAZZ Ven­ture Part­ners And Arbore­tum Ven­tures (press release):

“Aira’s ser­vice, which recent­ly con­clud­ed its beta-test­ing phase, is now avail­able to new users in the Unit­ed States. The tech­nol­o­gy solu­tion com­bines smart glass­es, ded­i­cat­ed band­width from Aira part­ner AT&T, and AI-enabled remote human agents to help blind and low vision indi­vid­u­als imme­di­ate­ly access key infor­ma­tion that they need about their envi­ron­ment. [Read more…] about Start-up Aira rais­es $12M, show­ing the way for cog­ni­tive sci­ence and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) to improve the lives of blind and low vision individuals

How the Brain of a Blind Person Rewires Itself

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Do blind peo­ple real­ly have a sharp­ened sense of hear­ing? What is the expla­na­tion? This arti­cle reports the work of Ger­man researchers who looked at blind peo­ple’s brains to try to answer these ques­tions. They found out that indeed, blind peo­ple can under­stand speech even if sped up beyond the max­i­mum rate that sight­ed peo­ple can under­stand. This seemed pos­si­ble because the brain areas devot­ed to vision in peo­ple with eye sight turned out to be respond­ing to speech in blind people.

10 syl­la­bles per sec­ond [is] the absolute lim­it of com­pre­hen­sion for sight­ed peo­ple. Blind peo­ple, how­ev­er, can com­pre­hend speech sped up to 25 syl­la­bles per second.

brain scan­ner revealed that in blind peo­ple the part of the cere­bral cor­tex that nor­mal­ly responds to vision was respond­ing to speech.…somehow an unsight­ed per­son­’s brain rewires itself to con­nect audi­to­ry regions of the brain to the visu­al cor­tex. [Read more…] about How the Brain of a Blind Per­son Rewires Itself