GhostOfCaptSpaulding
07-02-2009, 11:10 AM
[offsite:2lnz1jyn]Big brother untangles baby babble
"The first task we set for ourselves was to transcribe everything my son heard or said from nine to 24 months"
Deb Roy
In 2005, the artificial intelligence researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab set out to understand how children learn to talk.
"We wanted to understand how minds work and how they develop and how the interplay of innate and environmental influence makes us who we are and how we learn to communicate."
It was a big task and after years of research, scientists around the world had only begun to scratch the surface of it.
But now, Professor Roy is beginning to get some answers, thanks to an unconventional approach, an accommodating family and a house wired with technology.
And the research may even have kick-backs for everything from robotics to video analysis.
The question of how infants learn to speak is hotly debated. At its simplest level the argument comes down to "nature versus nurture".
On one side, scientists argue that children have an innate hard-wired ability to learn language, while on the other side, researchers argue that language is learned through interactions with the people and environment around them.
Between the two extremes is a spectrum of opinion.
Professor Roy wandered into this debate as someone originally more interested in robots than children.
"I was initially inspired by how children learn language as a new way of building machines," he says.
But looking through the raft of prior research on the effect of environment on language, he noticed a common problem; previous studies only offered snapshots of a child's development.
"Every parent knows that a child can change a lot in a week or a month," he told BBC News.
"If you're interested in the process of development then it is important to have a continuous view."
It is a problem recognised by other linguists as well.
"Current samples that the field works with - typically an hour of recorded speech a week - are one to two orders of magnitude too small for our scientific purposes," Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard University told BBC News.
So, Professor Roy, who by then had a child on the way, set about solving the conundrum. His solution: wire up his house with 11 cameras, 14 microphones and terabytes of storage and record every waking moment of his soon-to-arrive son.
It was christened the Human Speechome project and immediately drew comparisons with its genetic counterpart.
"Just as the Human Genome Project illuminates the innate genetic code that shapes us, the Speechome Project is an important first step toward creating a map of how the environment shapes human development and learning," said Frank Moss, the director of MIT's Media Lab at the time.
Professor Pinker, who is also an adviser to the project, said: "In developmental psychology there has long been a trade-off between gathering lots of data from a small number of children, or a small amount of data from a much larger number of children.
"Roy is simply pushing this trade-off to an extreme - a truly massive amount of data from a single child."
Now, a quarter of million hours of recordings later, Professor Roy is beginning to tease apart the masses of data and look for answers.
Follow the rest of the article here:
BBC | Big brother untangles baby babble (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8127804.stm)[/offsite:2lnz1jyn]
This is pretty scary/exciting stuff.
One application down the line: learning robots/AI.
Could the data being accumulated in this study give rise to superior electronic progeny, sowing the seeds, if you will, of our eventual irrelevance as a species?
"The first task we set for ourselves was to transcribe everything my son heard or said from nine to 24 months"
Deb Roy
In 2005, the artificial intelligence researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab set out to understand how children learn to talk.
"We wanted to understand how minds work and how they develop and how the interplay of innate and environmental influence makes us who we are and how we learn to communicate."
It was a big task and after years of research, scientists around the world had only begun to scratch the surface of it.
But now, Professor Roy is beginning to get some answers, thanks to an unconventional approach, an accommodating family and a house wired with technology.
And the research may even have kick-backs for everything from robotics to video analysis.
The question of how infants learn to speak is hotly debated. At its simplest level the argument comes down to "nature versus nurture".
On one side, scientists argue that children have an innate hard-wired ability to learn language, while on the other side, researchers argue that language is learned through interactions with the people and environment around them.
Between the two extremes is a spectrum of opinion.
Professor Roy wandered into this debate as someone originally more interested in robots than children.
"I was initially inspired by how children learn language as a new way of building machines," he says.
But looking through the raft of prior research on the effect of environment on language, he noticed a common problem; previous studies only offered snapshots of a child's development.
"Every parent knows that a child can change a lot in a week or a month," he told BBC News.
"If you're interested in the process of development then it is important to have a continuous view."
It is a problem recognised by other linguists as well.
"Current samples that the field works with - typically an hour of recorded speech a week - are one to two orders of magnitude too small for our scientific purposes," Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard University told BBC News.
So, Professor Roy, who by then had a child on the way, set about solving the conundrum. His solution: wire up his house with 11 cameras, 14 microphones and terabytes of storage and record every waking moment of his soon-to-arrive son.
It was christened the Human Speechome project and immediately drew comparisons with its genetic counterpart.
"Just as the Human Genome Project illuminates the innate genetic code that shapes us, the Speechome Project is an important first step toward creating a map of how the environment shapes human development and learning," said Frank Moss, the director of MIT's Media Lab at the time.
Professor Pinker, who is also an adviser to the project, said: "In developmental psychology there has long been a trade-off between gathering lots of data from a small number of children, or a small amount of data from a much larger number of children.
"Roy is simply pushing this trade-off to an extreme - a truly massive amount of data from a single child."
Now, a quarter of million hours of recordings later, Professor Roy is beginning to tease apart the masses of data and look for answers.
Follow the rest of the article here:
BBC | Big brother untangles baby babble (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8127804.stm)[/offsite:2lnz1jyn]
This is pretty scary/exciting stuff.
One application down the line: learning robots/AI.
Could the data being accumulated in this study give rise to superior electronic progeny, sowing the seeds, if you will, of our eventual irrelevance as a species?