. . . This is an improvised talk (and intro) based on a suggested topic from the audience. The speaker doesn't know the content of the slides. . . Our next speaker is an incredibly. . . is an incredibly experienced linguist working at a lab at MIT with a small group of researchers, and through studying our language and the way that we communicate with other people, he has stumbled upon the secret of human intimacy.
Here to give us his perspective, please welcome to the stage, Anthony Veneziale. You might think I know what you're going through.
You might be looking at me here on the red dot, or you might be looking at me on the screen. There's a one sixth of a second delay.
Did I catch myself? I did.
I could see myself before I turned, and that small delay creates a little bit of a divide. And a divide is exactly what happens with human language, and the processing of that language.
I of course am working out of a small lab at MIT. And we are scraping for every insight that we can get.
This is not often associated with a computational challenge, but in this case, we found that persistence of vision and auditory intake actually have more in common than we ever realized, and we can see it in this first slide. Immediately your processing goes to, "Is that a hard-boiled egg?"
"Is that perhaps the structural integrity of the egg being able to sustain the weight of what seems to be a rock? Aha, is it in fact a real rock?"
We go to questions when we see visual information. But when we hear information, this is what happens.
The floodgates in our mind open much like the streets of Shanghai. So many pieces of information to process, so many ideas, concepts, feelings and, of course, vulnerabilities that we don't often wish to share.
