How Intel helped talk to Stephen Hawking?

"Medicine has not been able to cure me, so I depend on technology to be able to communicate and live," said Professor Stephen Hawking on Tuesday, December 2, 2014 in London at the presentation of the new chair that Intel engineers had created him. It took three years of work, until then, for the British scientist to communicate with the rest of the world up to ten times faster than he did until then, also with another system produced by the same American company.

With the new chair, the sensor Hawking had on his cheek was detected by an infrared switch mounted on his glasses, which allowed him to select characters on his computer. The integration of the linguistic software technology of the British company SwiftKey, a predictive text app, improved the system's ability to learn from the teacher, predicting its next characters and words.

For two years, Swiftkey engineers worked on a custom language model for Hawking, similar to the application currently included in many mobile phones. The system learns what the user has already written in emails, messages or post on social networks to anticipate the words.

According to Intel, with this system Hawking only had to write less than 20% of the total of the characters communicated. Until the presentation of the new system, to perform a simple Web search Professor Hawking had to close his communication window, move the pointer to run his browser, move it back to the search bar and write the search terms. The new system presented in London at the end of 2014 automated all these steps.

The old system used by the British scientist who died yesterday was like "trying to use modern web applications and pages without keyboard or mouse," said Wen-Hann Wang, vice president of Intel and executive director of Intel Labs.

Today this system baptized as Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT) is available for the more than three million people in the world suffer the same disease that ended the life of Stephen Hawking at age 76. Thanks to ACAT, and tools that are used today in the field of artificial intelligence, the British professor was able to communicate to the world many of his theories, thoughts and scientific studies, including his theories of the Big Bang and black holes.