The Human Speechome Project

The Human Speechome Project is an effort to observe and computationally model the longitudinal course of language development for a single child at an unprecedented scale. The idea is this: Instrument a child’s home so that nearly everything the child hears and sees from birth to three is recorded. Develop a computational model of language learning that takes the child’s audio-visual experiential record as input. Evaluate the model’s performance in matching the child’s linguistic abilities as a means of assessing possible learning strategies used by children in natural contexts. First steps of a pilot effort along these lines are described including issues of privacy management and methods for overcoming limitations of fully-automated machine perception.