How did a person whose face was destroyed by sulfuric acid win a doctorate from a prestigious university and win a "genius award"?

Is this some kind of mystical gathering center?

There is indeed a group of "strange" people living in the basement of this university. they can work in the dark in the basement and form a cohesive group. They are actually a group of blind students.

These blind students are students from Berkeley, and this basement is the learning center for the blind in Berkeley. The official name of this learning center is Assistive Technology Center (assistive technology center), but people call this place "The Cave". Maybe people think of themselves as invisible to the eye, but their hearts are like Batman.

As its name suggests, the assistive technology center gives blind students convenience they cannot find elsewhere, and gives them access to world-class assistive technology for the disabled.

In fact, Cave had the best toolbox for the blind in America at that time.

As early as the 1980s, when the Internet was not yet popular, blind students could let computers read books and articles. In the pre-Internet era, the technology that caves could provide was unique.

For example, this machine called Kurzweil Reading Machine can scan text and convert it into speech and read it aloud.

The name of the machine may make you look familiar: it was invented in 1976 by computer scientist Raymond Kuzweil, now Google's engineering director, who wrote Singularity approaching, a best-selling book that predicts that AI will surpass mankind in the future.

Another machine called Thermoform machine can produce Braille on the spot, a bit like today's 3D printers.

Caves are very tolerant of blind students. Blind students can not only study by themselves in the cave, but also eat and sleep in it. The students are equipped with a "cave" key by hand, so they can stay as long as they want.

In addition, Berkeley's disabled students program provides subsidies to blind students, who can hire people to read books and type to them.

It is in this "cave" that blind students who have been bullied elsewhere gather together for warmth and gain comfort and strength from each other, and the small basement in Berkeley is not only a quiet refuge for them, but also a spiritual home.

It turns out that "cave" is also a talent incubator for universities. Berkeley's investment in these usually undervalued disabled people yielded unexpected benefits a few years later, as a lot of real "Batman" flew out of the cave.

One of them is Joshua Miele, a technical coffee.

Miele's hometown is New York, but he doesn't have any good childhood memories of New York.

When he was 4 years old, a neighbor with schizophrenia threw sulfuric acid in his face, which made him lose his sight and lose his face. At that time, 17% of his whole body was burned. When he was young, his parents always took him to various plastic surgery hospitals.

Fortunately, Miele is not an easy person to be knocked down, he is very precocious. At the age of 11, Miele told his parents that he no longer needed to go to the hospital for plastic surgery. He had accepted the reality and wanted to move forward on this new starting point.

The children at school always bullied him because of his appearance, but it was also because of this loneliness that he fell in love with books. When he was a child, Miele loved to read science fiction, and because his stepfather was a geophysicist, his family was often haunted by researchers.

In the book, he learned that chemical element 97 (Berkelium) was named after Berkeley, and that the university had a strong tradition of physics, which made him like it. So in the year he applied to college, he chose to major in physics at Berkeley and got the admission notice.

But what young Miele doesn't know is that Berkeley is actually a paradise for the blind. Berkeley is the birthplace of the disability rights movement in the United States and a base for supporters of the American Disability Act (Disabilities Act) in 1990.

Jacobs Teng Brock (Jacobus tenBroek), a law professor for the blind, taught at Berkeley. Newel Perry, a blind mathematician and educator, also graduated from Berkeley.

Before entering school, Miele looked down on the visually impaired because he thought he was better than the average visually impaired. But when he arrived at the "cave" in Berkeley, he identified with the visually impaired group for the first time. Miele told the US medical media Stat that it was in the "cave" that he realized that disability does not mean that the body is disabled.

Although Berkeley gives material benefits to people with disabilities that are not available elsewhere, teachers and students there do not give special attention to people with disabilities, even if they show mercy. Miele recalls that in Berkeley, "even if you were disfigured and blind, no one would look at you again, where diversity was tolerated and encouraged."

In 2021, the little boy who could only "gaze" at the world with one blue false eye became the winner of the famous MacArthur Genius Award. The MacArthur bonus is $655000, and there is no limit to the use of the bonus. He is also a researcher on Amazon's Lab126 team, developing cutting-edge technology for it.

He was surprised to learn that he had won the prize because he had been away from academia for many years. And this award is very sacred in his mind, in his words, the MacArthur Genius Award is similar to the "Nobel Prize in the United States."

And it was in the Cave that Miele freed up the technology he was most proud of.

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 relief on paper. Touch this intelligent map, and the map will read out the relevant information, such as where a bus stop is located and what lines of buses pass by. This makes it possible for the blind to move on their own. On TMAP, Miele said "this is the most exciting part of his career over the past decade."

In fact, this is his work when he was studying for his doctorate at Berkeley in the 1990s. In order to study how people perceive sound, he studied MATLAB, a math 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 an air keyboard, WearaBraille, for typing every other space. Blind people can type Braille on any plane as long as they wear motion sensors on their fingers.

He also built the YouDescribe system. This is a video search tool, you only need to enter the audio description of YouTube video, it can help you find the corresponding video. With Youdescribe, the visually impaired can also "watch movies" with friends with normal eyesight to know the development of the movie plot. YouDescribe now has users in 152 countries.

Miele is not the only Batman flying out of the Cave. In fact, the student center for the blind in Berkeley has "hatched" many outstanding people.

For example, Indian writer Ved Mehta is also a MacArthur Genius Award winner, and Fatemeh Haghighi is a professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Outstanding blind people are rare in the whole human society, but a hundred schools of thought contend in the "cave" of Berkeley. This contrast is worth pondering.

In fact, technologies essential to the blind, such as optical character recognition and text-to-speech synthesis, which can read books aloud, turned out to be useful for ordinary people, such as Siri's speech recognition and natural language processing, which can understand human instructions.

In this sense, "cave" is also the technological pioneer of the whole human society. If we could pay attention to the needs of people with disabilities earlier, wouldn't it be convenient for our own lives?

The residual blood at the beginning, the costume in the later stage.

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