Event Details
- Spring Science Lecture: "Meaning Machines"
Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Donnelley Lecture Hall in the Heimbold Visual Arts Center
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, theydevelop 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 andchairs 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.