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The birth of a word - Deb Roy

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TED Talk

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MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." This astonishing, data-rich research has deep implications for how we learn.

In order to probe the engagement properties of public media content, Roy and his colleagues are collecting and analyzing about three billion social media comments each month. Roy says they’re even able to identify key people who seem to exert a lot of influence over what other people watch on TV and say online. What do you think of this? Cool or creepy?

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