When he was 12 years old, Hartmut Haeffner got his first computer— a Commodore 64. On the C64, Haeffner learned to program, first for fun and then as a job, using the computer to track sporting events in his native Germany. He was fascinated with both what the computer could do, and the underlying technology that made it possible.

As a child, Bin Yu never dreamed she’d go to college. She grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, when nearly all of the country’s institutions of higher learning were closed. But in third grade, a cousin gave Yu a math book. She fell in love with the structured way of thinking and the concrete answers found in the textbook.

Emerging speech neuroprostheses may offer a way to communicate for people who are unable to speak due to paralysis or disease, but fast, high-performance decoding has not yet been demonstrated. Now, transformative new work by researchers at UCSF and UC Berkeley shows that more natural speech decoding is possible using the latest advances in artificial intelligence.