BBC_Science_Focus_-_08.2019

DISCOVERIES

AI created to translate

the cries of babies

Babies can cry because they are feeling

ill or are in pain, but they will also often

wail if they are feeling hungry or sleepy.

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little ones are mewling.

Now, a group of

researchers based

at Northern Illinois

University in the USA

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intelligence to create a

method to distinguish

between normal cry

signals and abnormal

ones, such as those

resulting from an

underlying illness.

The method could

be useful for parents at home as well as

doctors, who could use it to discern cries

among sick children, the researchers say.

While each baby’s cry is unique, they

share some common features. The team

developed an algorithm, based on an

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

“ere’s lots

of health-

related info

in various

cry sounds”

In numbers

1 IN 4

The proportion of women

who admit to engaging in

a ‘foodie call’ – going on a

date with someone they are

not romantically interested

in simply to enjoy a free

meal, according to a survey

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University in California.

100

The number of pesticides

banned in the EU, Brazil

and China that are still

widely used in the USA.

22%

The amount by which job

satisfaction rises when

employees are allowed

to take their dogs into

work, as calculated

by researchers at the

University of Lincoln.

existing automatic speech-recognition

system, to detect and recognise the features

of infant cries. The algorithm incorporated

a technique called compressed sensing – a

process that is able to reconstruct a signal

based on very sparse data, especially

in environments with high levels of

background noise.

The algorithm analyses the waveforms

of the infants’ cries, looking for features in

their loudness, pitch and timbre common

to a database of recorded baby cries

previously categorised by experienced

neonatal nurses and caregivers. For

example, The ‘neh’ sound is generally

related to being hungry, because when a

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typically pushed to the roof of the mouth,

which leads to the ‘neh’ sound. Similarly,

the ‘eh’ sound means that a baby needs

to burp. Generally speaking, this happens

after feeding.

“Like a special language, there is lots of

health-related information in various cry

sounds. The differences between sound

signals actually carry the information.

These differences are represented by

different features of the cry signals. To

recognise and leverage the information, we

have to extract the features and then obtain

the information in it,” explained study

co-author Prof Lichuan Liu.

The team hopes that the method could

be widened out to assist with other areas

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relies heavily on experience.

“The ultimate goals are healthier

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care givers,” said Liu. “We are looking

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and medical research centres [...] and

hopefully we could have some products

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JUPITER: A SPACE ODDITY

Analysis of 300 stars has hinted

that the gas giant Jupiter could be

something of a cosmic anomaly.

Astronomers using the Gemini

Planet Imager – an infrared

detector aached to a telescope in

the Chilean Andes – spoed six gas

giant planets orbiting some of the

stars they studied. But all six of

those planets were orbiting large,

bright stars: not one was found

around a smaller star similar to

our Sun. This suggests that our

Solar System might be unusual

in harbouring such a large gas

planet – a finding which may

help astronomers to beer

understand how Earth formed

and became habitable.