
Synthetic Sensors: Towards General-Purpose Sensing - Aissen
http://www.gierad.com/projects/supersensor/
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nmstoker
Measuring activity / usage is one thing but as they get more advanced it would
be exciting to explore detecting machine part failures as well.

As a child my father would relate how his father's time as a mechanic in WWI
left him with the skill to listen to a passing car and say what was wrong or
wearing out with particular parts of the engine.

Using ML to crack that and we'll have the good part of HAL from 2001 (although
in the film the item turned out not to be faulty if I recall correctly!)

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jhayward
I don't have specific examples but I have read of standard manufacturer tools
to do audio analysis of diesel engines to diagnose which part(s) are failing.
AFAIK this has been a standard type of diagnostic for decades, although
perhaps not as widespread or cheap to do as it is presently.

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zeckalpha
Similarly, with some practice, identifying engine types by ear (and possibly
models) isn’t out of the question. Airplanes, too, not just cars.

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tzakrajs
This technology is key to how we will detect fake or doctored videos.
Publishers will no longer be able to produce simple live video stream, they
will need to publish general purpose sensors to create an audit trail for
validating the contents. If you want to fake a video, you will need to forge
all of these other signals in a consistent way too.

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j16sdiz
You just need to timeshift them.

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anfractuosity
Very cool! I especially liked the approach to measure water or to count paper
towels left.

It reminds me of this paper
[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/192069](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/192069)
where they detect events such as an oven being turned on, by monitoring the
household power usage.

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brad0
This is cool! Building a context from many data points is impressive.

I could see this being built into phones for sure. If the phone can detect the
context with a small amount of battery it opens the phone to a whole lot of
applications.

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TeMPOraL
Absolutely amazing work! If it can be made reliable enough, this may be just a
key stepping stone towards actually useful IoT.

That said, I can't wait for a open source/open hardware on-premises
alternative - because there's no way in hell I'm running something like this
through vendor's cloud. They deserve credit for not sending raw sensor data to
the cloud, but vendor lock-in is still vendor lock-in. N-th-order sensors
should be products, not services.

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daenz
Really cool, don't get me wrong. But imo, the biggest achievement here is
explaining in non-technical terms how real world inputs can be mapped to
features in ML, and how the resulting classifications can be fed into state
machines. Obviously, none of this is groundbreaking, but it's explained so
clearly that the non-technical person can see the potential in the technology.

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thinkingkong
This is amazing - and from 2017 no less. I haven't had time to read the paper
but my only question would be how it handles the distinction of multiple
sounds in a room triggering multiple event states. For example, if I run the
shower and leave the faucet on, then turn off the shower, how does the ML
algorithm handle that, etc.

Very neat!

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wyldfire
Seems like a simple/interesting way for residential/commercial monitoring of
utility and appliance usage.

Maybe we could teach it how to listen for leaks, too. I'd probably pay for a
device that could sense anomalies like fire/flood/etc.

Especially useful to augment the senses for visual/hearing impaired folks.

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ggambetta
Off topic, but... why do the titles so many papers start with "towards"?

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czr
It indicates that you think the work is a meaningful contribution towards (but
not a full solution for) the problem named by the paper title. I'm not sure if
there's a distinct origin (see
[https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188988/what-
is-t...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/188988/what-is-the-
origin-of-the-towards-a-new-used-in-the-titles-of-some-research-ar)), but it's
fairly conventional these days.

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ipsum2
This is from 2017.

