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VO: Effortless interaction between humans and today's computer systems is
something most of us take for granted. Show host (man): Okay, Google how long will it take me to
get to Best Buy in Secaucus? Robot: On your way to Best Buy traffic is light as usual.
It is 22 minutes by car.
Show host (woman): Alexa, what time is it? Alexa: It's 3:28 p.m.
VO: If you've used any mobile or desktop device or made any call to a company or
organization with an automated phone system then you've benefited from the
field of human-computer interaction or HCI.
The technologies behind HCI have been in development since the 1930s.
Demo host: Well we've heard the voder make a word, and by combining words, of course, we get a sentence.
For example, Helen, will you have the voder say "she saw me"? Voder: "She saw me."
Demo host: That sounded awfully flat. How about a little expression? Say the sentence in answer to these questions:
Who saw you? Voder: SHE saw me. Demo host: Whom did she see? Voder: She saw ME. Demo host: Well did she see you or hear you? Voder: She SAW me.
Tech show host: The other half of computer voice technology is synthetic speech. [Robotic voice heard in background]
CallText from SpeechPlus is a text-to-voice simulator that turns ASCII input into speech.
GTE of California and Michigan Bell have embraced the idea for rapid database
retrieval when clarity is more important than the subtleties of intonation.
Robotic voice: I don't know the word "insulator." Is it a noun, an adjective, an
adverb or should I ignore this sentence? Tech show host: Science fiction fantasies are one thing.
But at AT&T Bell Labs scientists have developed one of the world's most
sophisticated robots: a machine that comprehends and responds to the human voice.
Robotic voice: I don't know the word "green."
Tech show VO: How close is science fiction to becoming science fact?
Robotic voice: Okay, it's a green, tall, hard rectangular block. I knew that, just checking.
Tech show VO: After nearly two decades of experimentation, the promise
of voice recognition technology is at hand.
The first application may soon be no farther away than the nearest telephone.
VO: One of the pioneers of human-computer interaction is someone you've probably never heard of.
Her name is Catherine Wolf.
Starting in the 1970s, Cathy Wolf helped teach computers to learn how we humans communicate.
As a research psychologist she designed and tested interfaces
between people and machines: speech-to- data, handwriting-to-type, and more.
At Bell Labs and IBM, Cathy studied how verbal cues translate into meaningful information.
And her work led to technologies like an automated teller
system that allowed customers to do their banking remotely.
Ad: Someday, banks and
other businesses will get help from a new computer that lets customers pay
their bills over the telephone. This ingenious computer not only verifies
your identity, it can talk in plain English.
Actor (woman): I think I'm hearing "don't you like me." Listen. Robotic voice: Don't you like me?
Actor (woman): Shouldn't the phrasing be more like "Don't you like me?" Actor (man): You're right, the T followed by a
Y sound. Let's modify it now. Ad VO: At Bell Labs engineers in scientists are busy
teaching a computer how to speak your language so that someday you may be able
to talk on the phone with a computer in plain English to get faster, more
economical directory assistance and voice verification when banking by phone.
Actor (woman): OK, let's hear it. Robotic voice: Don't you like me better now? Actor (man): That's good.
VO: But for the past 20 years Cathy Wolf has had an entirely different relationship
with the technologies she helped to develop. In the late 1990s she was diagnosed with
ALS — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known to many as Lou Gehrig's disease.
ALS causes progressive loss of motor functions until, one by one, the body's systems
shut down. There's no cure for ALS, and patients usually survive just a few
years after diagnosis. But Cathy has defied the odds and lived much longer
than most with the disease. To communicate she relies on a special
computer system that she controls with her eyebrows.
Cathy has even turned her disease into a tool, uncovering new insights into HCI
for individuals with disabilities.
Wolf: When I was a postdoc at MIT, I learned about ELIZA, one of
the first computer programs to interact with humans in a seemingly intelligent way.
Then at Bell Labs in the early 1980s, I worked on the very first cellphone.
It was was so big and expensive, we thought only traveling salespeople would use it.
At that time, speech recognition could only be done on
a bulky mainframe. I didn't envision the cellphones of today.
VO: In the 1980s, Cathy joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where she began
developing tools to augment human-computer interaction.
My early work at IBM was on using gestures like proofreaders marks as a user interface
and for collaboration. I led a team that made an exhibit for the Smithsonian
Information Age exhibit. With a colleague, I invented the first gesture-based
system for collaboration called We Met. It is similar to present-day smartboards.
Danis: Gesture recognition at that point was really being able to let's say do
editing of a document using, rather than pressing a key, using some kind
of mark, some kind of typographical mark that you might use to
indicate "get rid of this paragraph" or "insert something here" or something like that.
And eventually I think she moved into
the extension of that, which was handwriting recognition.
VO: Cathy soon turned her attention to a new system she called the conversation machine.
It was designed to let people carry out basic transactions in
conversational language using a telephone-based interface.
Vergo: One of the hallmarks of a good researcher is to pick important problems,
and Cathy did that. I think she had a good nose for what were the important
things to work on and where she should be investing her time.
Speech recognition, which is when when people
speak to a computer taking that audio and translating it into text — whether
that text is a command to the computer or dictation — so that you
can essentially write a report by simply speaking, she did a lot of the
original studies that tried to understand what does it mean for a
human being to interact with a computer in this way? Because it was
unplowed ground. And so I know that her reputation and background was in
the speech recognition area.
Actor: Speaking. It's one of the most natural things we do. It's also the basis
of a remarkable research project at IBM. This is an experimental computer
system that recognizes what I say. I talk, and my words appear on the computer screen.
Wolf: We had two applications, the banking system and a system to help customers
choose a personal computer. I was the user interface expert. I figured out the
different ways people might say things and tested the system. We used IBM's
speech recognition and natural language understanding that were eventually
showcased in Watson's appearance on Jeopardy!
Alex Trebek: Watson! Watson: Who is Franz Liszt? Trebek: You are right.
Watson: What is violin? Trebek: Good. Watson: Who is the Church Lady?
Trebek: Yes! Watson! Watson: What is narcolepsy? Trebek: You are right,
and with that you move to $36,681. [Audience applauds]
Vergo: So I wasn't at first working directly with Cathy, but her reputation was
really outstanding. She was considered the consummate analytical scientist and
very, very objective. And she was, I think, viewed as a resource to many people in
the research division and certainly was to me early on as I got into human-computer interaction.
Touma: Well Cathy clearly was the expert in this area within IBM Research. If you had a question if you
needed to understand how certain technology can just translate into yeah how the person
the people use it Cathy would the person to go to. She has many years of
expertise this area but also she had that gift in being able to explain
things in a way that people can understand them, can relate to.
Scientifically speaking she could keep up with a lot of topics within the
research community so she really was on top of her game throughout.
Laura Wolf: I remember when we were younger we would sometimes test the things that she was working
on, which was really fun. Like she worked on a voice recognition software so we had
it on our phone before people, now everyone has it now but we
would pick up the phone and say: Call Dad at work or call whoever and you'd hear
your voice say that, pre-recorded, which we were kind of just testing it
out. That was always cool — and to try to get it to say, like, have the dog bark
and see who it would call. And then I remember another — she worked on the
voice-to-type, right? So she would say something, type her emails, like
talk them, and it would often change my name to "Clorox" or "larva," which
I did not like that one! [laughs] And then whenever she said "love ya" it
changed it to "Columbia," so to this day we usually sign emails Columbia,
and that means "love ya." Vergo: So I met Cathy, interestingly,
in a way that had nothing to do with work. We were both runners and working in
Hawthorne, and I would see her occasionally when I went out during
lunchtime for a run. And we would talk about running and exercising, and I
remember one of my first recollections was that she started having some
difficulty and there was some kind of persistent numbness in her leg that
she couldn't quite figure out, and obviously that was the beginning the
very early beginning of the the onset of ALS.
Wolf: Figuring out I had ALS was a long road. I had sensory symptoms not typical of
the disease. I thought it might be Lyme's, and I had IV antibiotics.
I didn't progress as fast as is typical. I went to Columbia University's ALS center
many times, Johns Hopkins twice, and finally Beth Israel,
where they said I have a "smoldering case" of ALS. I knew ALS was a possibility much
earlier than the final diagnosis. My mother accompanied me to Beth Israel. We
hugged each other and cried. Joel Wolf: Well that was a kick in the face, a big kick in the face.
God, it's hard to remember all the possible things it could have been at
one point. We're praying it wasn't MS and then we're praying it was MS.
And eventually I would say about a year after the symptoms first started we had,
by process of elimination, a verdict. It was a diagnosis which you can't get
worse than, and so the fun began. Erika Wolf: I had gone with her to a couple of her
appointments and people weren't really saying ALS right away. By the time that
they did, I had sort of taken on full-on like doing tons of research and doing a
lot of writing about ALS. I was I was an undergraduate so I was writing
about the genetics of ALS and genetics classes I was in creative nonfiction
classes writing about my experience of watching her decline and
really trying to take as much control as I could by trying to understand it more.
Laura Wolf: So I was in high school when she first started getting sick.
I actually have a memory that my Dad, he had heart surgery, and I remember being
in the hospital after his bypass surgery I must have been I don't know maybe a junior in
high school and and he was recovering and I remember her saying something
about how she was having trouble moving her leg, and I remember thinking like, Mom,
we have to focus on dad right now! But then I was definitely a freshman in college and
I remember being in my dorm room when they called and said that
it was definitely, that it was ALS.
I remember looking it up online and the life
expectancy that you read online is one to three years so it was just too real.
Wolf: To their credit no doctor told me I had two to five years to live.
There is a coping mechanism in which the typical patient afflicted with a disease
thinks at the outset she or he will fare better than the typical patient. I had this attitude.
There is not a typical case of ALS. I describe my case as slowly
losing the use of my legs, my arms, my ability to swallow, and finally my
ability to breathe while my mind remained sharp as ever. Danis: So at that time she must
have been working for this guy Stephen Boyce who was RD GM has since retired.
And his take was that he will make it possible for her to do whatever she
wants to do, however she wants to handle it. If she wants to leave and retire,
she wants to go on disability, she wants to keep working — whatever it was that she
wanted to do, he was going to make she was able to do. And I was really, you
know, I really respected him for that and I really
am very grateful for him and that was really sort of for me sort of the best
of IBM in that he would have that kind of reaction. So it was like
whatever she wanted to do, and what she wanted to do was to keep coming in.
Vergo: As her manager, I was acutely aware of what was happening, and she would
come to work, she would be in a walker, and eventually
she was having very, very serious difficulty. But she really
managed to just stay focused; she had a level of determination and intensity
about her from the very beginning that was a marvel to see. Touma: She already had
started suffering from the illness, and she was already
kind of suffering from it in terms of not being able to walk straight and
needing assistance, but that didn't prevent her from getting
on the plane, flying with us to Minneapolis. At no time have we felt that
she was ill or, I mean you could see it, right, because she was walking slow or she
walked with a cane, but at no point have we felt that she was suffering from
this — she would hide it very well. And again, her intellect has
continued to be so sharp that it's very impressive to see that
despite all the physical difficulties that she was having already at that time
you couldn't see it. Erika Wolf: She actually already had ALS but she had to speak at a
conference in Edinborough and she needed someone to help her out going there, and
I think she wanted to have like a special trip, too. So she and I went to
this conference of hers in Edinburgh, Scotland, and then we went to Paris for a
trip and I got to sit in on her talk and be with her colleagues and
see how they all interacted, and I mean it was remarkable.
I didn't really know at that point that she was so highly sought after.
Laura Wolf: I remember coming home to visit from Boston and every time
I came home she would definitely be weaker. Like she had a walker for a while
and she would do laps around the kitchen and the living room. I'd come home
and she could do two laps and then the next time I came home she could
only do one lap, and then the next time my dad had to help her into bed.
And so at the beginning there was definitely — she she got worse kind of quickly.
Joel Wolf: And she continued to work and people
knew me in the — the women at IBM Research knew me quite well because I
was a popular feature in the ladies' room
at IBM because I would help her go to the bathroom. Finally she fell at IBM,
broke her nose. They gave her an aide to work with us to help her in her office.
She was really losing her ability to type and such, and they continued to
let her work for quite a while and eventually it became obvious that she'd have to stop.
Wolf: The cruelest loss was the loss of speech. After a bad night I found
myself on my back in the emergency room of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. I was
faced with the question of whether to have a tracheostomy, a procedure that
allows you to breathe with a ventilator and also makes breathing on your own
easier. The question wasn't if; the question was whether this was the right time.
The ALS team tried to convince me it was the right time. I remember the
nurse practitioner, a longtime member of the team, said that refusing would be
like writing "do not resuscitate" on my chart.
I asked, Will I be able to go to Erika's graduation in Boston early in June?
The answer was yes. I had researched the changes that tracheostomy would bring,
and I just wanted to delay them a few months. My husband Joel held my hand
and whispered, "It's really time." I decided better six months early than
six months late. I took the biggest breath I could and said "yes." I am
optimistic by nature. I decided to live with ALS rather than die with it.
Joel Wolf: And because she was proactive, partly also because she was a
human-computer interaction specialist and she could deal with the new
difficulties by finding the appropriate software and using that software
properly on her computer she really was able to keep going. VO: Today Cathy has no
volunteer muscle function except for a few muscles in her face. But she can
manipulate a computerized communication system with her eyebrows. With this
system Cathy can interact with the world even after 20 years with ALS.
Wolf: I get up at 10, get to the computer by 1, do email. Then I work on my poetry class or I
work on an article update, my Facebook fan club or check my personal Facebook.
At 10 I watch TV, usually news or The Daily Show. While I
watch TV, the nurse does evening care. I am in bed between 11:30 and midnight.
Danis: The thing about Cathy is that she always sort of made the best of whatever
situation she was in, and that's always been Kathy.
I mean she's continued to be very involved
in life, whether her personal life or professional life or her community life.
Vergo: I visited her at home at a point where she, from all objective evidence,
wasn't able to move at all, I couldn't really understand how
she was controlling the cursor on the screen or pressing the mouse because
the movements were almost imperceptible to me, but she was doing it and using it
to communicate back and forth to me and at the same time I knew that she was
using the same technique to continue to write papers. It was it was astounding.
Danis: She is very interested in understanding about ALS and in contributing to the
knowledge of of the disease and also to really, I mean, I think she has
a number of friends through Facebook who do have ALS and
she's very active in trying to help people to live with it.
My activity with other people who have ALS is issued-based, like
the recent FDA hearing on ALS drug development. I also check the Patients
Like Me ALS fum at least once a month to see if I can add anything.
I will always try to help someone who asks me.
VO: In addition to her advocacy work, Kathy has continued to contribute to ALS research.
In 2009 she scored just one out of 48 on a rating scale that tested for
motor function in ALS patients but Kathy knew she had abilities the scale wasn't measuring.
So, with researchers from an organization called Patients Like Me,
Cathy painstakingly developed and tested new items to rate motor function in
patients with advanced ALS. Wolf: In my career I wrote more 100 research articles.
I have six patents. But of all the research I have done I am most proud of this.
VO: Kathy has also helped scientists with an experimental system that lets patients
who can't move or speak control digital and mechanical systems with only their thoughts.
Wolf: We are continually trying new algorithms and new applications for my
brain-computer interface, or BCI. I mostly make suggestions about the user interface.
As she was talking to me there was — the word that comes to mind is ferocity
Her eyes were working hard to control the cursor and to get one letter at a
time out in order to have a conversation with me and it was that same intensity
and ferocity that carried her through all the work that she continued to do.
So she's a staggering individual from
the perspective of strength and perseverance.
Danis: She's not somebody who's gonna sit around and complain. She's really going
to figure out what the next thing is, and I think that kind
of I don't know attitude and that kind of strength is really what's driven her
to you know continue picking up new interests and to continue,
just continue with her life, and that's remarkable and it's just very inspirational to me and I think to a lot of people.
Wolf: I don't think of myself as disabled. After so many years this is the
new normal. But when my grandchildren visit and Joel plays with them in ways I
can't I am sad. Also when I go out and I am always the most disabled. Sometimes I
think: Why me? Most of the time I focus on what I can
do, not what I can't.
Joel Wolf: Okay I would say
it's harder on the person who gets the disease but it's virtually insane for
the person who is the spouse because the demands are
really real. When you get married you say all those vows and they're just words
and eventually they're not just words and they really, you know sickness and
health and all of that stuff, they mean something. I wouldn't recommend it.
There's no way I would recommend being an ALS spouse to anybody. But we didn't
get choices; Cathy didn't get any choices and I didn't get any so you deal with it.
Wolf: 78 breaths per minute. Eight not dead yet
A great cat remains faithful, curled at my feet or a stretched long on my body,
His furry warmth comforts me through knowing nightmares and the loneliness of
3:00 a.m. He knows without knowing the kindness of touch.
I started writing poetry after I went on long-term disability.
I guess my interest in poetry is related to my fascination with all aspects of
language: rhyme, meter, different ways of saying things. Touma:I am not too active on
Facebook these days but you know some of her poems made their way to me to
my mailbox sometimes. She yeah, she continued to kind of try to be
creative and do things that keep her sharp and keep
her going and not let that get in the way.
Joel Wolf: I think a lot of people who get this diagnosis say okay, party's over,
basically. But Cathy did not want it to do her in.
She would make those statements very, very clear, that she was going to find a
way to keep going it wasn't going to
finish her off. And she would say basically ALS is not a death sentence. Erika Wolf:
Yeah, no she's amazing, it's really remarkable. I mean when I think
about her longevity with ALS I think okay, part luck, part really terrific
nursing care, and part sheer determination, which you can see in the lineage from as far
back as I know, personally. From my grandparents to her to me to my son, even.
You can see this determination to do difficult things.
VO: Through it all, Cathy Wolf continues to be an inspiration for
patients living with ALS, for women in technology, and for anyone who can
appreciate her struggles and her incredible will to live each day to the fullest.
Wolf: I fight for many things. In the future I hope the world will become a
fairer, kinder, more peaceful place. I hope terrible diseases like ALS
and cancer will be cured. And I hope my kids and grandkids and other family
members will be happy, whatever that means for them.