Get a Job In Silicon Valley by Playing a Coding Game

What if an online coding game could land you a six figure job in California? Well playing CodeFights could do exactly that. James Johnston discovered CodeFights through a Facebook ad and was intrigued so he started to play. After two nights of coding problems, a pop up message appeared asking Johnston if he was interested in getting a new job. He clicked yes and the next day Tigran Sloyan, founder and CEO of CodeFights, called him and talked about potential jobs. Over the next month Johnston had a dozen interviews and landed a job in Silicon Valley. Johnston went from designing software for orthodontists in Chattanooga, Tennessee to working for Thumbtack, a one billion dollar startup located in Silicon Valley. He even got a stake in the business. 

From launching in 2014 CodeFights has registered five hundred thousand users, just in San Francisco. The twenty best players are given the best opportunities for jobs, but their has still been dozens of players who have landed jobs in the past month alone. Petroff quotes CEO Sloyan saying, "about 20% percent of people who are connected with companies secure a new job"(CNN). However, there is a cost for companies who hire programmers through CodeFights. CodeFights charges companies who hire their player 15% of the annual salary that they plan to pay the new employee. Even though this is a high price to pay, many companies are still interested in investing in the top tech talent, which are the players who are best at the coding games. CodeFights helps build individuals' coding ability and offers new talent to companies hiring software programmers.

Resources:

Petroff, Allana.http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/17/technology/coding-jobs-game-silicon-valley-codefights/ 

https://codefights.com/about

https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/02/codefights-scores-2-4-million-to-turn-coding-practice-into-a-game/

Creating Wireless Virtual Reality

The biggest issue with current virtual reality headsets is they must be connected to computers and systems that allow the headset to project such high-resolution visuals. The headset is connected to computers by an HDMI cable that is annoying to users as they have to maneuver around it and try not to trip. Recently, researchers at MIT's CSAIL department have worked together to develop the MoVR, a system that allows users to use any virtual reality headset wirelessly. The system works by using millimeter waves, which are high frequency radio signals, to connect to the computer and wifi. Millimeter waves are known to possibly be a part of the futures' amazingly fast smartphones.

Wireless virtual reality headsets are more comfortable for users, but they can't access all the advanced data-processing. In order to project the same high-resolution visuals as a vr headset with a cable input, the wireless system needs data rates of more than six Gbps, which cannot be achieved with any system today. MoVR works with mmWaves, which have been used for things like high speed internet and cancer diagnosis. However, the downside of mmWaves is in order for them to work with virtual reality headsets there must always be a connection between the transmitter and receiver. This connection can be blocked very easily by moving anything between the two. The CSAIL team of researchers found a way around this problem by creating MoVR to act as a programmable mirror that can find the mmWaves signal and reflect it back to the receiver. MoVR is programmed to use angles to accurately reflect the mmWaves signals from the transmitter towards the receiver on the headset. MoVR's are able to find the angles through two antennas, called phased arrays, that focus signals into beams which are sent to the MoVR system.

References:

http://news.mit.edu/2016/enabling-wireless-virtual-reality-1114

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/185580/20161112/htc-vive-virtual-reality-headset-goes-wireless-220-upgrade-kit-now-open-for-preorders.htm

Using Computer Science to Detect Childhood Communication Disorders

Massachusetts General Hospital's Institute of Health has been working with researchers from the Computer Science department at MIT to create a computer system that automatically determines whether or not a child has a speech or language disorder. It's important to diagnose these disorders at a young age so the children can learn to grow out of the disorder by the time their an adolescent. Unfortunately, sixty percent of children go undiagnosed by the time they reach kindergarten. This system works to diagnose speech and language disorders by analyzing children's audio performances on reading a story. The children watch a series of images and narrative about a story and then they need to tell the story back in their own words. To check how accurate the system was researchers had to, "use a standard measure called area under the curve, which describes the tradeoff between exhaustively identifying members of a population who have a particular disorder, and limiting false positives"(Hardesty). The researchers' performed three tests to find its accurate about eighty percent of the time. In medicine, if the system works more than seventy percent of the time it is considered an accurate test.

Two graduates of MIT, John Guttag and Jen Gong, believed that pauses in children's speech, when they try to complete sentence or remember a word, are sources that help diagnose communication disorders. So they implemented thirteen acoustic features of children's speech into their system to be recognized. Their system recognizes certain patterns of pauses and error in speech that correlate to the communication disorders it can diagnose. Some of the acoustic features it can recognize are length of pauses, short or long pauses, and variability of the length of the pauses. Thomas Campbell, a professor of behavioral and brain sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas says, "The researchers’ automated approach to screening provides an exciting technological advancement that could prove to be a breakthrough in speech and language screening of thousands of young children across the United States"(Hardesty).

Resources:

Hardesty, Larry. http://news.mit.edu/2016/automated-screening-childhood-communication-disorders-0922

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/23/machine-learning-could-automate-screening-kids-for-speech-       and-language-disorders/