I have hours and hours and hours of videos of my kids. I'm not
kidding. Just the videos I have taken with my regular digital camera
are taking up most of the memory on my laptop. It's becoming a real
problem. Still, I've got
nothing on Deb Roy. His son is one
year old and Roy has already amassed over 12,000 hours of video of the
little guy. Why, you ask? How, you ask?
Roy is doing research. He is trying to teach English to a robot.
Seriously. He is the director of the Media Lab's Cognitive Machines
Group. That is the why. Here is the how: they have equipped his house
with 11 cameras and 14 microphones trying to capture everything the
baby does to learn how to speak. Crazy, huh?
Wired has a great article detailing how this all came about.
I feel kind of sorry for all of the graduate assistants that have to
watch all of that footage. I mean - it is one thing to watch your own
baby sleep. It is another thing entirely to watch hours and hours and
hours of video of someone else's kid sleeping.
It's a whole new kind of reality tv. (yawn)
