Deb Roy’s ambitious Human Speechome Project

An MIT professor is working on a very ambitious 3-year project to understand language development in humans. Deb Roy, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and director of the Cognitive Machines Group MIT Media Laboratory is recording every moment of the first 3 years in his son’s life. Roy has outfitted his house with 11 cameras and 14 microphones to make sure that he does not miss any of the significant events in the baby’s language development. One year into the project, Roy has already recorded over 120,000 hours of video that is constantly annotated and analyzed by his graduate students; the project apparently collects over 200 Gigabytes of data daily.

The idea behind this project is to collect data about language development in humans and create a model of how early words and grammar are learned. Once such model is constructed, researchers can use it to teach language to robots. According to Roy,

We're primarily capturing the environment of the baby so we can feed that into a learning system on the computer

The project has been running for almost a year and one of the biggest hurdles at the moment is storing and analyzing the vast amount of video and audio data collected. For privacy reasons, there are gaps in the data but this is still the most comprehensive project in childhood development to day. Wired Magazine recently published a very detailed article about the Human Speechome Project.