Apple Siri, Google Voice could help save the world's languages

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Summary: 80% of all web communication is in ten languages, yet 95% of humanity speaks roughly 300 languages. As digital services and devices move to voice control, the commercial opportunity could help close the digital linguistic divide, says the Long Now Foundation.

The majority of the world’s languages have only a few thousand speakers each, therefore, provide no commercial incentives to preserve or to enable on the web.

If you look to the left of the long tail, however, said Dr. Laura Welcher, Director of Operations for the Rosetta Project at the Long Now Foundation, there are about 300 widely spoken languages that do provide motivation for providers of digital services and devices because this group accounts for 95% of all people on earth. (See the yellow colored band in the image).

Credit: Dr. Laura Welcher, Long Now Foundation

In a recent talk given at UC Berkeley’s Language Center, Welcher described her organization’s goal of creating an open public digital collection of all human language as well as an analog backup– the Rosetta Disk– a solid nickel surface with 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation that can last for thousands of years.

Experts say that we lose a language every two weeks and up to 90% of roughly 7,000 languages will go extinct in 100 years. To counter the trend, the Long Now Foundation is leading a herculean effort to preserve thousands of endangered languages around the world.

In her talk, Welcher applauded Google’s plan to sample 300 languages from around the world to help improve its Voice Search product, saying that ideally the data collected would find its way into the public domain such as Language Commons or Rosetta Language Base on Freebase (an open platform owned by Google).

Welcher said that the long tail of roughly 6,500 languages could benefit from development of the 300 (and vice versa) if we build better algorithms that can work with less data. Long tail languages can also be helped through philanthropic efforts.

“As companies make corpora, if it is open then linguists can access it and help build a platform to help endangered languages of the world,” she asserted.

Welcher did not cover Apple’s Siri voice controlled personal assistant technology. But it currently supports three languages (English, French, German) and in 2012 will include most of the top ten used languages on the web, namely Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. As Siri grows in both linguistic diversity and capability, any second-tier languages may take less resources to support, giving Apple the green light to contribute to open resources on human languages.

If there is anything that the Rosetta Project needs to fulfill its objective, it’s help. The current collection contains 100,000 pages of scanned material documenting over 2,500 languages, as well as a growing library of crowd-sourced audio and video recordings. But that’s just a scratch on the surface. There is substantial machine readable corpora for only about 20-30 of the world’s languages. Welcher expects to add only 500 more into the digital domain over the next 10 years unless she can substantially scale the effort.

Programs like the 300 Languages Project and “Record-a-thon” are helping to close the gap, but it will take more to reach her goal of documenting at least 5,000 languages before they disappear. Welcher asked: “How do we get the isocode for all human languages and develop a universal corpus with reliable machine translation?”

Welcher ended her talk with a vision of a free and open encyclopedia of human languages that could model Wikipedia and the encyclopedia of life.

Further reading:

Internet Archive: The Rosetta Project
The DVD-Sized Rosetta Disk Will Preserve Human Language For Eternity
Found in Translation: The blog of the Berkeley Language Center

Related:

A ’stone-like’ optical disc that lasts for millennia
The Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 year clock

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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$1,000 house a step closer for world's poor

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Summary: MIT architects have produced the first prototype “Pinwheel House” in an effort to see if low-cost homes can be constructed for $1,000, total.

The brainpower at MIT has been harnessed to help improve housing conditions for the billions of people living in poor rural conditions on less than $1 per day.

The first prototype from the Institute’s “1K House” project–an effort launched in 2009 to see if low-cost homes can be constructed for $1,000–has been constructed in Mianyang, in Sichuan Province, China, an area ravaged by the 2008 earthquake.

Pinwheel House interior. Credit: Ying Chee Chui

Pinwheel House is modular dwelling consisting of two natural materials, earth block and bamboo, that can be easily assembled via interlocking rectangular room units that surround a central courtyard space.

It was designed by Ying Chee Chui, a graduate of MIT’s Department of Architecture and currently an architectural practitioner in New York City.

“The module can be duplicated and rotated, and then it becomes a house,” Chui says. “The construction is easy enough, because if you know how to build a single module, you can build the whole house.”

Drawing inspiration from One Laptop Per Child, the idea for a $1,000 homes was first conceived as a design challenge by Tony Ciochetti who chairs MIT’s Center for Real Estate.

Chui’s house is one of 13 plans that emerged from the first 1K House design studio. It features hollow brick walls with steel bars for reinforcement, wooden box beams, and is intended to withstand a magnitude 8.0 earthquake. The first prototype measured 800 square feet and turned out to be more costly, at $5,925, but still very inexpensive in relative terms.

A 500 square feet version of the house could be built for about $4,000, according to Chui, and still lower if a large number of the homes were built at once. Nonetheless, Yung Ho Chang, a professor of architectural design at MIT who helped oversee the 2009 1K House design studio, thinks the prototype has fulfilled the promise of Chui’s design. “The house Chee built has good ventilation and good light,” Chang says.

But plenty of hurdles remain before any home can be manufactured for $1,000 or less. “If it were easy, somebody would have done it,” Ciochetti says.

The house is made of modules 13.8 sqm. The assembly method is the same for each unit, thus, if you know how to build one module, you know how to build them all. Credit: MIT

At any rate, the project’s success has spawned a related effort for home designs intended for Japan, A new MIT design studio is working on a home that would cost $10,000 to build. It would provide housing for victims of natural disasters, such as the earthquake and tsunami that struck northern Japan last March.

Ultimately, convening further studios in the vein of the 1K House project will allow more designs to move from the drawing board and onto solid ground, according to Chang. “The inexpensive laptop got to be more than an idea, it became available for children. I hope one day we’ll be in the same position.”

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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Meet MABEL, world's fastest robot with two legs (w/ video)

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Summary: The world’s fastest bipedal robot with knees has a human-like gait and reaches speeds of up to 6.8 miles per hour.

A two-legged robot at the University of Michigan can run like a human and reach a peak speed of 6.8 miles per hour. MABEL, as the machine is called, is believed to be the world’s fastest bipedal robot with knees.

Built in 2008 with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, MABEL has been in “training” for the last few years.

Researchers have been progressively improving the feedback algorithms that keep the bipedal robot balanced while reacting to its environment in real time.

It’s weight is distributed like a person’s and it has a heavier torso and light, flexible legs with springs that act like tendons.  Whereas other speed-walking robots achieve a flight phase–when both feet are off the ground–for less than 10 percent of each step, MABEL is in the air for 40 percent of each stride, much like a human.

“We envision some extraordinary potential applications for legged robot research: exoskeletons that enable wheelchair-bound people to walk again or that give rescuers super-human abilities, and powered prosthetic limbs that behave like their biological counterparts,” said Jonathan Hurst, now an assistant professor at Oregon State University, who helped create the robot.

The advantage of two-legged robots with good running form would give them an edge over wheeled-bots in rough terrain and inside places built for humans. They could one-day serve as robotic soldiers or rescuers, the engineers say.

“The robotics community has been trying to come up with machines that can go places where humans can go, so a human morphology is important,” said Jessy Grizzle, a U-M professor.

In the video below, the bar that MABEL is attached to guides it in a circular path. Also, you’ll see it speed up and then abruptly slow down several times on purpose.

(Source)

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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