[EDLING:4] The Power of Babble: Infant and Robots

[Francis M. Hult]

Wired 15.04

The Power of Babble

MIT researcher Deb Roy is videotaping every waking minute of his infant son's 
first 3 years of life. His ultimate goal: teach a robot to talk.

The time is late morning. The place, a home in the Boston suburbs. Wriggling 
around on the living room floor with his baby boy, Deb Roy invents a game. One-
year-old Dwayne watches him, then joins in. Fingers wiggle and arms waver. 
Rules change, morphing with their moving limbs. After a while, Dwayne tires. 
Roy picks him up and, cradling the child in a hug, lays him gently in his crib.

Fast-forward several weeks. In a laboratory at MIT, a grad student named Rony 
Kubat is editing a videoclip on a PC monitor. Onscreen, there's Dwayne (a name 
used for this article only), resting just as his father left him in the crib 
that morning. Roy watches as Kubat punches keys to scroll through the footage. 
Other grad students sit at computers nearby. A 6-foot-tall robot slouches, 
deactivated, in the corner. Arms crossed, Roy scrutinizes the images, which are 
overlaid with spectrograms and Kubat's annotations.

Full story:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/truman.html