Data Science Is The New Alchemy, But This Time It Really Turns Into Gold
Image of project that MIT Scientist Deb Roy presented at TED conference yesterday.
Deb Roy surely is a guy dedicated to his science. When he and his wife got a kid, he fitted all rooms in their house with fisheye lenses and microphones in the ceiling, connected to a huge harddisk rack, recording over 200 Terabytes of data in the first two years of his son’s life. That’s 90,000 hours of video and audio, every moment between his 9th and 24th month.
Aside from the very creepy privacy aspects (he filtered the video before it went to his team at MIT), this is amazing. Through this heap of data they were able to trace the learning of language (luckily his son learned fast) and other things. Check out this article on Fast Company for more information on the scientific findings.
One very eerie moment came when he showed the 3D capabilities of his technology. His kid will be able to relive his childhood while making the camera fly through the rooms, all while the video goes on. Of course it’s rendered 3D (from the fisheye), but it looks good enough to make the whole thing look like a very weird sci-fi movie. Remember that one time when your older brother taunted you when you were like four? With this technology, you’ll be able to relive that moment over and over and over. Fun times! On the other hand, Roy showed the first two consecutive steps his baby ever took, and his son will be able to watch this, too, once he’s old enough to understand (and use the remote).
He also showed some great visualizations that came out of this research, like time-series of movements inside the house, and visualizations of where a word was said (overlaid over time) so that you can visually understand how the learning process for certain words worked. Water, obviously, is mostly spoken about in the kitchen and in the bathroom. Bye, on the other hand, near the door.
Now, Roy is on leave from MIT and making this technology into money, applying its capabilities to media consumption and discussion – how the audience reacts to a certain piece of television content on social media. Good for him.
I was lucky enough to see this video in a livestream from the real conference in California, organized by my team mates at TEDxZurich. But everybody in the audience knew that this was one of those TED talks that will gather millions of views really quickly once TED releases it. Jaw-dropping technology, good presentation, the human factor, newly generated knowledge – it’s all in there. In the meantime, check out the few videos available in the Fast Company article.
