Human speechome project
Encyclopedia
The Human Speechome Project, (rhymed with "genome"), is an effort to closely observe and model the language acquisition of a child over the first three years of life.
The project was conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
's Media Laboratory
by the Associate Professor Deb Roy with an array of technology is used to comprehensively but unobtrusively observe a single child - Roy's own son - with the resulting data being used to create computational model
s to yield further insight into language acquisition.
A digital network consisting of eleven video cameras, fourteen microphones, and an array of data capture hardware was installed in the home of the subject. is located in the basement of the house to capture the data. Data from the cluster is moved manually to the MIT campus as necessary for storage in a one-million-gigabyte (one-petabyte) storage facility.
To provide control of the observation system to the occupants of the house, eight touch-activated displays were wall-mounted throughout the house to allow for stopping and starting video and or audio recording, and also erase any number of minutes permanently from the system. Audio recording was turned off throughout the house at night after the child was asleep.
Data was gathered at an average rate of 200 gigabytes per day, necessitating the development of sophisticated data-mining tools to reduce analysis efforts to a manageable level, and transcribing significant speech added a labor-intensive dimension.
The project was conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
's Media Laboratory
MIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a laboratory of MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of design, multimedia and technology, the Media Lab has been widely popularized since the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a...
by the Associate Professor Deb Roy with an array of technology is used to comprehensively but unobtrusively observe a single child - Roy's own son - with the resulting data being used to create computational model
Computational model
A computational model is a mathematical model in computational science that requires extensive computational resources to study the behavior of a complex system by computer simulation. The system under study is often a complex nonlinear system for which simple, intuitive analytical solutions are...
s to yield further insight into language acquisition.
Detail
Most studies of human speech acquisition in children have been done in laboratory settings and with sampling rates of only a couple of hours per week. The need for studies in the more natural setting of the child's home, and at a much higher sampling rate approaching the child's total experience, led to the development of this project concept.A digital network consisting of eleven video cameras, fourteen microphones, and an array of data capture hardware was installed in the home of the subject. is located in the basement of the house to capture the data. Data from the cluster is moved manually to the MIT campus as necessary for storage in a one-million-gigabyte (one-petabyte) storage facility.
To provide control of the observation system to the occupants of the house, eight touch-activated displays were wall-mounted throughout the house to allow for stopping and starting video and or audio recording, and also erase any number of minutes permanently from the system. Audio recording was turned off throughout the house at night after the child was asleep.
Data was gathered at an average rate of 200 gigabytes per day, necessitating the development of sophisticated data-mining tools to reduce analysis efforts to a manageable level, and transcribing significant speech added a labor-intensive dimension.
External links
- Deb Roy's MIT home page
- Article in New Scientist
- Article in Wired Magazine
- Language Acquisition, (draft), Steven Pinker of MIT.