Mark Riccobono:
Our next speaker became blind in her teenage years, and it was like so many of us unsure what that would mean for her life. Unfortunately, she learned about a radio astronomy project, which captured her imagination and gave her motivation for an entire career.
Now, one of my first assignments for the National Federation of the Blind as a staff member was to put together science programs. And starting in late 2003, I was part of our key relationship team with the folks at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
I spent a lot of time with the folks at the Goddard Space Flight Center and in 2005, there's a lot of talk about this young woman that they had as a blind intern at Goddard. And I was just asking her because I don't think we ever actually met each other at that time.
But I know that I heard a lot about Wanda Díaz and the work that she was doing as an intern at that time. And so it's really great that our stories intersected there, but they also come back together enthusiastically at this moment, 20 years later, when we have the opportunity to hear from a blind woman who is living the life she wants pursuing interesting research and scientific topics in astronomy.
She's really a leader in her field, especially in Sonification and many other areas, which I'm sure I don't well understand. She can explain them much better, and I was really happy to come across her again when I had the opportunity to attend the National Federation of the Blind of Puerto Rico convention last year.
So here to speak with us about the work that she does and to inspire us about the opportunities for blind people in science, technology, engineering, and math is Wanda Díaz-Merced.
Wanda Díaz-Merced:
Good morning, evening, afternoon to you all. You sound so full of energy. That is the effect scientifically, that is the effect of a good lunch and a wonderful, magnificent convention organized with only the human centered in the organization of the convention. Congratulations to you all.
President Riccobono, thank you so much for the very kind invitation to present here at the convention. It is the highest honor, and I wouldn't be anywhere else. It took me almost 24 hours to arrive. I left, it was supposed to be six hours, but then it multiplied by four.
Mark Riccobono:
Tell him what time you got to the hotel.
Wanda Díaz-Merced:
Oh, that was the longest time to arrive to the hotel. But before it multiplied to infinite, it stopped.
We all got together. We put our hands, we put our hands to work, and mainly my determination to say, no, I need to be in New Orleans, so you better take me there. That was it. Sometimes we have to be firm, right? Respectful, but firm.
I also want to thank my people from the National Federation of the Blind of Puerto Rico who are sitting back there with all their energy. It has been because of their love. Not only their love, but their support and their advice.
That many things in my life has begun to move in the direction of victory and many victories that are cooking right now that I will not tell you about that. So I will tell you a little bit of my story, which is a story I don't have a long time, but it's a story that is unconventional inside the unconventionaties or conventional of our histories.
I humbly will begin my story relating to you or based on humble conversations that I have had with scientists that are blind and scientists that are early on with early onset disabilities that they study science, but then they finish working on accessibility or education and people outreach or doing something else unrelated to the science, which is what they trained themselves to do.
Education and people outreach is very important. It's the most important. It's the basis of everything. But if I didn't study to do education and people outreach, why do you divert me to education and people and people outreach. My sight loss sped severely and aggressively. I'm diabetic since I was a child very, very, very small. And my sight or my vision or how do you say that in English, help from Puerto Rico.
My sight loss sped severely and aggressively. And already at my early twenties, I was totally blind. I only have 5% of sight vision or peripheral vision on one eye. So I cannot read if I'm in darkness or in this. I do not know if there is light in this room. I assume there is because sighted people, they need to orientate, right? But I cannot orientate unless I have my very good friend, the cane.
So by being here with you and having accepted the invitation, the very kind invitation from President Riccobono, I trust that we will reach a time when if we do education and people outreach, it's because of choice and not because we have been diverted into that.
When we are in the education field, when we are getting educated, we will be able to worry only about getting good grades than to improve the accessibility of material that had to be accessible before getting to our hands.
That we will be able to focus on our human development, on the development, on the skills that we want to develop. Because I experienced losing my sight during my development. So I experienced and I learned using monosensorial styles, monosensorial, I mean using your sight. That was the main style at that moment because I experienced that and being very, very careful with my words, having then later lost that kind of freedom.
It brings me to grief at the thought of the countless peoples that give up, that stop considering and even think that the field, the work market or even the field of science, but I'm talking about the work market, going to have a job and be productive not only for society but for yourselves is something that is reserved for just you.
And with that, it makes me grief the thought of the countless peoples that may just give up, not contributing to society. So today being said that I'm here as a scientist who uses multisensory perception or the many human senses, sight, touch, sense, the tongue.
We are not using it right now, but who says that we are not going to use it, that use combination of sensorial human senses or multisensoriality reality to explore, to use our perception to scrutinize data sets, to do exploration of astronomy information.
I do not do accessibility for the sake of the ones coming behind me for the millions that will raise after this convention. Today, I don't do accessibility. When people come to ask me about accessibility, I tell them, go and ask a specialist on accessibility. I didn't study that. I'm a scientist who focus on doing research and producing results on my research.
So thank you. So the situation of lack of access led me to do an interdisciplinary doctorate on human computing interaction and astrophysics. So as I was doing my PhD in astrophysics and analyzing data, I had to build a prototype that I was using, I had to use in order to analyze the information.
A good mentor at NASA Godar Space Flight Center, his name was Robert Candy. He gave me the opportunity to go to work with him as an intern. My grades were very, very, very bad. They were the shame of the university. I was almost like, I don't know how the grading is in here in the United States, but my best grade was a D, almost an F. But I would pass the class. I was studying hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, but not understanding anything that was happening in the classroom.
And perhaps you have heard this before, but when recording, when sneaking a recorder into the classroom after recording the mathematics or the nuclear physics class, the only thing that I would be able to understand was these sounds. You put this here, there and substitute here, and then after you do this, this, this, this, this and this, this is the result.
Nothing else. So not even my professors had the skills to convey with words what they were explaining. I was completely left out of their loop. So, when I'm working with Bobby at NASA, he said, one, I want you to do a project in order to translate the data that is saved in the heliophysics data facility databases into sound for blind people to become familiarized with the data that is saved in that database.
And I said, I don't want to become familiarized because I'm already familiarized. I want to do the science. So he said, well make it so. So I began working 24/7 in order to make this data not only accessible, remember I don't work with accessibility, but to make it accessible to Wanda. And for Wanda to be able to listen and to find ways so other people can extract science from the data.
So we worked 24/7 because even though he was asking for blind people to become familiarized and I didn't want to become familiarized, he was giving me a scenario and I said, this is the scenario to move things forward, to demonstrate to my mentor who is trusting me.
He trusts that I can do this. He said, make it so, make it happen. I need to honor that trust and I need to show him that he's not losing my time with me. So I worked 24/7. I wouldn't go out, I wouldn't socialize with the other interns.
Why would I socialize with them? I wouldn't understand what they were talking about. They would talk about these huge projects saying words that I had never heard before. And because I couldn't read, I couldn't even imagine how those words were written. It was a very, very bad situation.
But my mentor very patiently, he answered all the questions very respectfully. And one day I said, Bobby, I don't know if I can finish the goal, if I will be able to achieve the goal. And he said, the only thing I need is for you to continue doing what you do, working really, really, really hard.
What I like of you is that you're not waiting for anyone to come and do it for you. And I took that as an strengthening of that act of trust. At the end of the semester, of the summer, I published my very first scientific paper on the most energetic explosions in the universe called gamma ray verse.
And we released the first edition of the Sonification prototype. So we did experiments because why these people were not using sound. Is this a Wanda thing or is this something that they stopped using it because they're very smart, these people, they know it all. It must be because of a reason. But I couldn't find evidence.
So I did experiments and from the experiments with professional astronomers at the University of Harvard, the Center for Astrophysics, this Harvard Smithsonian Center for astrophysics, with evidence with professional astronomers that sound increases sensitivity to events in the astronomy information that by nature are blind to the human eye, transforming completely our role in the science from benefactors only for focusing on education and people outreach to benefactors of the science that can come to the science and with our skills, make more discoveries and reach the discoveries in science.
And with that, and with that gave us a big impulse because it also revealed a huge fracture in the sciences that because of the evolution of machinery and technology focusing on monosensorial technologies and monosensorial, productivities had left out other performance styles in order to produce better science and produce results for society.
So I have been going from one observatory to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next, the next. And infinitely to the next. Always been diverted to education and people outreach.
But when I noticed that they come to divert me to education and people outreach, I said, Uhuh, I didn't come here to do that. You need to hire someone that will focus on that. And when I do my science with my science done, I will go and do education and people outreach.
So I went into Italy and my mentor in Italy, late Dr. Eva. Dr.Eva, he said, I trust sound as gravitational. The gravitational science, I trust sound to allow us to peruse more information from gravitational wave telemetry or measurements.
So we analyzed a very well known event in the gravitational wave community, and we did it that way because no one would be able to contradict my findings. If I would find something new, I would say, you have perused that data over and over and you couldn't find what I found.
So we analyzed the data using audio, and we were able, with audio, we were able to find things that were blind to artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms, and also to the other collaborators in the gravitational wave sciences. And I want to play the sounds for you.
[Sounds of gravitational waves]
You need to notice the change. It's very subtle. It's very fast.
And it's at some point in the dataset. Sighted people, machine learning algorithms, it is augmented, right? So we zoom into the data, we augment the data in order to make it very, very, very sensorially perceptible with the hear of everyone. But I am going to play it for you gravitational waves.
[Sounds of gravitational waves]
So after coming back from Italy or being in Italy, working with my mentor, I realized that the work for equality and the work for us to mainstream in the job market, in economy, in society, that those two jobs, those two tasks are equal, are prestigious, and we should pay the same attention to the two tasks are of the same equality and are equally important, thankfully and very enterprising.
And look into the future, her royal Highness, Dr. Princess Nisreen El-Hashemite has established a new organization under the Royal Academy of Sciences International Trust. This organization is called Science in Braille. These are professional scientists that are doing their science.
They're producing science. I go around just making sure they're doing their science, they're performing their science, and we sit down in order to transform not only the scientific economy, but the work economy into a multisensorial economy that will allow us to perform at our own maximum, and that will support and enhance the ways we have to perform at our own maximum.
So this work also includes having very difficult conversations with different peoples, right? Because sometimes the economy depends, onsens on monosensorial technologies on monosensorial ways of performing. So sometimes difficult conversations and sometimes convincing stakeholders.
This is the way to go because our skills produce more science and more benefits to society. Again, multisensorial reality is not for accessibility, not yet is to produce more results for society and the economy. And you are the ones with the skills from birth because you lost your sight in any way.
You are the ones that can come into that economy and transform that economy into one that will autonomously give the chance to everyone. Right now, we are using Sonification. Sonification has gone to Luxembourg. The asteroid foundation is using it for defense, is being used to do diagnosis on neonates or SI do not know how to say that.
Neonates at birth. When a child is born, it recently comes out of the mother. So doing diagnosis of autism to children, also being explored to use it in flights for astronauts and to security for pilots, also to training for people in the autism spectra and many other things. My students, they do that. Some of them, they didn't know how to divide when they were in high school. And I think they build antennas. They learn to divide, they learn to do their operations. They don't give up. And I think, and I believe, and I'm completely sure they're the most outstanding people in the world, because they didn't allow any social stigma to stop them.
They took things in their hand and they transform it, and they didn't give up in their dreams. Right now, we are all, this is how I want to finish. We are all at the stage of life. Each and every one of you is at the stage of life with a future in your hands.
The decisions we take here at the National Federation of the Blind, it moves the country forward. It moves each of our lives forward. At all moments is our time to win. And we will achieve equality by keeping focus, not being diverted and by not giving up. And remember, always keep in mind that to win is to never give up. Thank you, and I apologize.