Written by Seven Kings
The Moffitt Library at the University of California, Berkeley, has a "weird" basement, an unventilated basement with no windows and often no lights, but the air is thick with human smell.
Is this the center of some mystical assembly?
Moffitt Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Image source: wikipedia
In the basement of this university lived a group of "strange" people who could work in the basement in the dark and formed a cohesive small group. They're actually a bunch of blind students.
These blind students are all students of Berkeley, and this basement is berkeley's blind learning center. The learning center is officially called the Assistive Technology Center, but people call it "The Cave." Probably everyone sees themselves as "Batman" who can't see with their eyes, but whose heart is like a mirror.
Assistive Technology Center in Berkeley. Image source: berkeley.edu
As its name suggests, assistive technology centers give blind students conveniences they can't find anywhere else, and give them access to world-class assistive technologies for people with disabilities.
In fact, the Cave had the best toolbox for blind people in the United States at the time.
As early as the 1980s, when the Internet was not yet widespread, blind students could make computer books and articles read aloud. In the pre-Internet era, the technology that caves could offer was unique.
For example, this machine called Kurzweil Reading Machine can scan text and convert it into speech.
The name of the machine may seem familiar to you: It was invented in 1976 by computer scientist Raymond Kurzweil, now director of engineering at Google, who wrote "Singularity Near," a bestseller in the future of predicting that AI surpasses humans.
Another machine called Thermoform Machine could make Braille on the spot, a bit like today's 3D printers.
The Cave is very tolerant of blind students. Blind students can not only study in the "cave", but also eat and sleep in it. The students were each given a "cave" key, so they could stay as long as they wanted.
In addition, Berkeley's Student with Disabilities Program provides a stipend for blind students, which they can use to hire people to read and type aloud to them.
braille. Image source: wikipedia
It is in this "cave" where blind students who are bullied elsewhere huddled together to warm up and gain comfort and strength from each other, and Berkeley's small basement is not only a quiet refuge for them, but also a spiritual home.
It turns out that the "cave" is also a personal incubator for universities. Berkeley's investment in these often undesirable disabled people produced unexpected gains years later, as quite a few real "Batmans" flew out of this "cave."
One of them is technologist Joshua Miele.
Joshua Miele。 Image credit: Amazon
Miele's hometown is New York, but he doesn't have fond childhood memories of New York.
When he was 4 years old, a neighbor with schizophrenia poured sulfuric acid on his face, leaving him blind and disfigured. At that time, he was burned on 17% of the area of his body. When he was young, his parents always took him to various plastic surgery hospitals.
Fortunately, Miele is not an easy person to be overthrown, he is very precocious. At the age of 11, Miele told her parents that she didn't need to go to the hospital for plastic surgery anymore, that he had accepted reality and wanted to move forward on this new starting point.
Miele before disfigurement. Image credit: Jean Miele/Amazon
The children at school always bullied him because of his appearance, but also because of this loneliness, he fell in love with books. As a child, Miele loved science fiction, and because his stepfather was a geophysicist, the family was often haunted by researchers.
In the book, he learned that the chemical element Berkelium No. 97 was named after Berkeley, and that the university had a strong tradition of physics, which made him feel good about the school. So in the year he applied to college, he chose physics at Berkeley and got an admission notice.
The chemical element Berkelium (Berkelium) named after Berkeley. Image source: wikipedia
But what young Miele didn't know was that Berkeley was actually a paradise for the blind. Berkeley is the birthplace of the Americans with Disabilities Advocacy Movement and the base of supporters of the 1990 Disabilities Act.
Jacobus tenBroek, a blind law professor, taught at Berkeley. Blind numberist and educator Newel Perry is also a graduate of Berkeley.
Before enrolling, Miele looked down on the visually impaired because he felt that he was better than the average visually impaired person. But at Berkeley's "cave," he had a sense of identification with the visually impaired group for the first time. In an interview with American medical media Stat, Miele said that it was in the "cave" that he realized that disability does not mean that the body is mutilated.
Miele volunteers for the education of people with disabilities. Image credit: Jean Miele/Amazon
Although Berkeley gives people with disabilities material benefits that they do not have elsewhere, teachers and students there do not cast special eyes, even pity, on people with disabilities. In Berkeley, Miele recalls, "even if you're a disfigured blind, people don't look at you much, where diversity is tolerated and encouraged." ”
In 2021, the little boy, who could only "gaze" at the world with one blue prosthetic eye, became the winner of the famous MacArthur Genius Award. The MacArthur prize is $655,000 and there is no limit to the use of the prize money. He is also a researcher on Amazon's Lab126 team, developing cutting-edge technologies for them.
Miele is now an engineer at Amazon. Image credit: MEG COYLE/AMAZON
He was surprised to learn that he had won the award, because he had been out of academia for many years. And the prize was so sacred in his mind that, in his words, the MacArthur Genius Award was similar to the "Nobel Prize of the United States."
It was in the "cave" that Miele unleashed his most proud technique.
He invented Tactile Maps Automated Production (TMAP). This is a software that can generate 3D touchable maps. With this system, geographic data can be printed into reliefs on paper. Touch this smart map, and the map will read out relevant information, such as where a bus stop is located, and what lines of buses pass by. This makes it possible for blind people to move autonomously. Regarding the TMAP system, Miele said that "this is the most exciting of his career in the past decade".
Touchable maps made by TMAP software. Image source: macfound.org
In fact, this is what he did when he was studying for his PhD at Berkeley in the '90s. In order to study how people perceive sound, he learned MATLAB, a mathematical software commonly used in science and engineering, and then spent six months developing how to display data with sound and touch, which is the prototype of TMAP.
He also developed WearaBraille, an air keyboard for air typing. Blind people with motion sensors on their fingers can type Braille on any plane.
Air keyboard WearaBraille. Image source: macfound.org
He also built the YouDescribe system. This is a video search tool, you only need to enter the audio description of the YouTube video, it can help you find the corresponding video. With Youdescribe, visually impaired people can also "watch a movie" with a friend with normal vision and know the development of the movie's plot. YouDescribe now has users in 152 countries.
YouDescribe, which can search for videos with audio. Image source: macfound.org
Miele isn't the only Batman flying out of the Cave. In fact, Berkeley's Center for Blind Students "incubated" many prominent figures.
For example, Indian-American writer Ved Mehta is also a macArthur Genius Award winner, and Fatemeh Haghighi is a professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai Medical College. Outstanding blind people are rare in the whole human society, but in the "cave" of Berkeley, there are hundreds of schools of thought, and this contrast is worth pondering.
Indian-American writer Ved Mehta is a poet and MacArthur Genius Award winner. Image source: wikipedia
In fact, optical character recognition technology and text conversion speech synthesis technology, which can read aloud from books, which are essential for blind people, have since been shown to be useful to ordinary people, such as Siri's speech recognition and natural language processing technology, which can understand human commands.
In this sense, the "cave" is also a technological pioneer for the entire human society. If we could have paid attention to the needs of people with disabilities earlier, why not give our own lives convenient?
Blood at the beginning, god at the end.