Tomorrow, Deb Roy from the MIT Media Lab will be giving a talk in the Heimbold Lecture Hall at 5:30pm. The event looks really interesting, so I thought I’d pass along more information:
How do we use words to say what we mean, and how do children learn to do so? These are central questions for the cognitive sciences and have long been pondered by philosophers, linguists, neuroscientists, and others, yet satisfying answers remain out of reach. The ease with which even young children use words belies the hidden complexities of mental and physical processes that give words meaning.
Professor Roy’s research lab takes a somewhat unorthodox approach to addressing these questions. On one hand, they develop robots and other interactive systems that use language to talk about the world. On the other, they develop new ways to observe and analyze human-to-human communication in both physical and virtual worlds. This presentation will highlight a range projects ongoing in Roy’s Cognitive Machines lab at MIT including conversational robots; modeling social behavior in a virtual restaurant; and the Human Speechome Project – an effort to observe and analyze one child’s language acquisition based on over 200,000 hours of audio-visual observation.
Deb Roy directs the Cognitive Machines group at the MIT Media Lab and chairs MIT’s academic program in Media Arts and Sciences. His research is frequently featured in the media including on National Public Radio and in Scientific American and Wired. More information on his work can be found at his Web site.
Hope to see you there.