Robots to replace Linguistic Anthropologists

[galey modan]

This part is pretty excellent:

the microphone picks up tone and the length of speaking time but does
not record any of the actual words spoken.

Galey

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 7:36 AM, Kerim Friedman <oxusnet at gmail.com> wrote:
> I, for one, welcome our new robotic converstational analysis overlords.
>
> - Kerim
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/business/26novelties.html
>
> October 26, 2008
> Novelties
> You May Soon Know if You're Hogging the Discussion
> By ANNE EISENBERG
>
> PEOPLE who want to improve their communication skills may one day have
> an unusual helper: software programs that analyze the tone,
> turn-taking behavior and other qualities of a conversation. The
> programs would then tell the speakers whether they tend to interrupt
> others, for example, or whether they dominate meetings with
> monologues, or appear inattentive when others are talking.
>
> The inventor of this technology is Alex Pentland of the Massachusetts
> Institute of Technology, who has developed cellphone-like gadgets to
> listen to people as they chat, and computer programs that sift through
> these conversational cadences, studying communication signals that lie
> beneath the words.
>
> If commercialized, such tools could help users better handle many
> subtleties of face-to-face and group interactions — or at least stop
> hogging the show at committee meetings.
>
> With the help of his students, Dr. Pentland, a professor of media arts
> and sciences at M.I.T., has been equipping people in banks,
> universities and other places with customized smartphones or thin
> badges packed with sensors that they wear for days or even months. As
> these people talk with one another, the sensors collect data on the
> timing, energy and variability of their speech.
>
> Dr. Pentland, known as Sandy, calls his gleaning and processing of
> conversational and other data "reality mining — using data mining
> algorithms to parse the real life, analog world of social
> interactions."
>
> The tools he has developed might help people change their
> communication tactics, including those that lead to unproductive
> workplace dynamics, said David Lazer, an associate professor of public
> policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
>
> Mr. Lazer praised "the richness of the data" captured by the process —
> the "minute-by-minute, fine-grained data on whether you are talking,
> whom you prefer to talk with, what your tone is, and if you interrupt,
> for instance."
>
> That kind of tool is rare, Mr. Lazer said. "Our existing research
> tools for gathering this kind of data aren't very good," he said — for
> example, questionnaires in which people self-report on conversations.
> Reality mining may be more accurate, and has the potential to show
> "all sorts of interactive patterns that may not be obvious to
> individuals in an organization," he said.
>
> Many of Dr. Pentland's research studies with smartphones and badges
> with embedded sensors are discussed in his new book, "Honest Signals,"
> recently published by MIT Press. The badges use tools including
> infrared sensors to tell when people are facing one another,
> accelerometers to record gestures, and microphones and audio
> signal-processing to capture the tone of voice.
>
> With the array of sensors, the badges can detect what Dr. Pentland
> calls "honest signals, unconscious face-to-face signaling behavior"
> that suggest, for example, when people are active, energetic followers
> of what other people are saying, and when they are not. He argues that
> these underlying signals are often as important in communication as
> words and logic.
>
> For example, the badges register when listeners respond with regular
> nods or short acknowledgments like, "Right." Such responses, he
> argues, are a kind of mirroring behavior that may help build empathy
> between speaker and listener. He also examines patterns of turn-taking
> in conversations, as well as gestures and other, often unconscious
> signals.
>
> Future smartphones that take advantage of his technology may act as
> friendly personal assistants, automatically putting through calls from
> friends and family, but sending all others straight through to voice
> mail.
>
> "The phone can be like a butler who really gets to know you," he said,
> by deciding to ring brightly for an urgent call when its owner has
> forgotten to turn on the ringer.
>
> In the research, many steps are taken to make sure the identities of
> participants remain anonymous, said Anmol Madan, a graduate student of
> Dr. Pentland. For instance, when microphone audio data is collected,
> the microphone picks up tone and the length of speaking time but does
> not record any of the actual words spoken.
>
> So far, Mr. Madan has found that the data gathered by mobile phones is
> far more accurate than accounts of the same information reported by
> participants.
>
> "Humans have a lot of bias when they recall their behavior," he said.
>
> Tanzeem Choudhury, a former student and collaborator of Dr. Pentland
> and now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth,
> continues to do reality mining with smartphones.
>
> "We spend a lot of time talking about how to improve communication
> skills," she said. "This work lets us pin down what makes
> conversations effective by analyzing people's actual conversation in
> their social networks."
>