LENA

[Kim Oller]

I am a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Infoture, Inc.,
which is the producer of LENA. Perhaps rather than responding to
specific interests and concerns that were expressed in the recent
postings, I'll just offer to talk with anyone who wants to know about
the company and the tools it has developed. Also I would encourage any
one who would like to talk with people at the company directly to do
so. These are very friendly and open people. Perhaps the most
appropriate contact would be Jill Gilkerson at 303 441 9014 or
JillGilkerson at infoture.org.

I wouldn't be involved if I didn't view the developments at Infoture
as extremely positive and indeed fundamentally important to our
futures, both scientific and clinical.  Infoture invested heavily to
develop a battery-powered recording device that weighs about an ounce
and yields good quality (16kHz) data for 16 consecutive hours. Further
they have developed extremely intriguing software that processes the
data to yield a variety of automatic measures -- in particular, pretty
reliable counts of adult words spoken in the sample, child
vocalizations, and conversational turns. Much more is on the way, and
the software itself is rapidly continuing to be improved and
enhanced.

These developments are going to be extremely useful for those of us
who are interested in large scale naturalistic sampling that can be
done all day long in the home. I am recording now with LENA and intend
to do longterm, longitudinal research using it, including research
employing neural network approaches that need really large quantities
of data. Infoture is not just developing devices -- they already have
over 40,000 hours of recording, much of it on a carefully stratified
longitudinal sample. This sample is going to be a tremendous resource
for research, and Infoture has done very significant research with it
already. Collaborators from a variety of universities are already
seeking to use the database for specialized projects, and Infoture is
making adaptations to encourage that kind of collaboration and
utilization of the data.

In part my enthusiasm about this is due to my belief that laboratory-
based research needs to be supplemented with large-sample naturalistic
research. I don't think it is likely that we will be able to process
really large samples without automated preprocessing. So the Infoture
efforts are laying infrastructure for critical research,
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