Throughout the past year, we followed some interesting new inventions in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Here is a look back at some notable AI developments in 2022.

Facebook’s parent Meta said it had built a technology tool to directly translate between English and the Hokkien language, a spoken language without a widely used written form.

Meta said it trained its AI models on written text examples from Mandarin Chinese. In addition, developers used an encoding tool designed to compare spoken Hokkien to similar English text.

Researchers announced a new Al method to identify Parkinson’s disease. The system works by measuring a person’s breathing patterns during sleep. With just one night of sleep, the Al system was able to correctly identify Parkinson’s up to 86 percent of the time. With 12 nights of data, the rate went up to 95 percent.

Researchers announced they had created a technology tool that uses pig sounds to interpret different emotions.

The tool is based on thousands of recordings collected from more than 400 pigs throughout their lives. The scientists developed an AI-driven algorithm to identify a series of emotions pigs could be experiencing. It is expected to lead to further systems farmers can use to improve the productivity and well-being of their animals.

Researchers — led by Alphabet’s AI company Deep Mind — said they developed an Al system to help fill in missing words in ancient writings. The tool, called Ithaca, is designed to help historians repair the writings and identify when and where they were written.

The team said that when historians work on their own, the success rate for repairing damaged writings is about 25 percent. But when humans teamed up with Ithaca to assist in their work, the success rate jumped to 72 percent.

Inventions born out of love

John W. Hammes, an architect from Wisconsin, created the InSinkErator in 1935. Hammes got the idea after watching his wife spend time wrapping food in newspaper and throwing it out. The InSinkErator is a device, put under a kitchen sink between the sink’s drain (排水管)and the trap. The disposal unit tears food waste into pieces small enough—generally less than 2 mm in diameter(直径) —to pass through the drains.

William Stewart Halsted, M. D. (1852-1922)was a well-known US surgeon who is often called the “Father of Modern Surgery”. Known for his strict insistence to sterile(无菌的) working conditions, Halsted invented rubber gloves that allowed his colleagues to lessen the transfer of germs(细菌)during their work. Yet the initial reason why he created them is more romantic than you would think. Knowing Caroline, a nurse, suffered from a skin diseuse during her work, Halsted invented the gloves especially for her and gave them to her as a gift after their marriage.

When Josephine Knight Dickson from New Jersey kept cutting herself while cooking for her family in the 1920s, her husband, Earle Dickson, stepped in. Dickson, a cotton buyer for Johnson &Johnson, according to the company’s website, decided to invent a temporary adhesive (有黏性的) bandage for his wife. His creation became the Band-Aid we all know and use today.

Maura Horton’s husband, Don, was a football coach who had Parkinson’s disease. One day, after Don struggled to button his shirt before a game, Horton decided there needed to be a better clothing option for people suffering from a disability. So, Horton designed a shirt with magnetic buttons in 2012. These buttons will finally allow everyone to dress and undress themselves efficiently.

Forget fetching sticks and chewing bones, that's so last century. Today's dogs have much more exciting options when it comes to hobbies-including video calling their owners.

And who let the dogs online? That would be DogPhone inventor Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, a lecturer and assistant prolessor in Animal-Computer Interaction at the University of Glasgow in Sootland.

Hirskyj-Douglas observed that in the curtent pet tech market, the user experience is centered around the owner, rather than the dog, so she set out to change that. After creating and testing her device, she published her findings and says they're particularly relevant at a time when some pets are experiencing separation anxiety after spending months with their owners during the pandemic(大瘟疫).

“No one's really done this sort of stuff before," Hirskyj-Douglas said. "Where do we even begin making things from a dog viewpoint?" To answer that question, she didn't have to look too far-her own10-year-old black dog,Zach, provided ample inspiration for how such a communication device could work.

With the help of researchers from her former workplace, Aalto University in Finland, Hirsky) Douglas created the DogPhone-a sensor hidden inside s ball that makes a video call from a computer whenever it is moved.

Although Hirskyj-Douglas isn't completely sure that Zach was aware he was calling her each time he used the ball, she said she never trained him to use it, and she believes more dog*centric tech is needed on the market."The way that we make devices for dogs currently is not really the same standard as we make for humans-we're treating them a bit like they don't really have any agency(能动性)," she said."The animals that we keep in our lives are a lot smarter and deserve a lot better technology than what we have for them,"

Whether he was aware or not, Zach kept Hirskyj-Douglas's phone ringing-by the end of the experiment,he was calling her up to five times a day. But when she tried to call him, he didn't always answer--which he could do by moving the ball.