Noticed this one from PurpleCar. (I first noticed it through the TED Facebook page and meant to watch it, but for whatever reason did not bookmark it. So maybe better to say renoticed.)

Roy setup cameras in his house to capture everything that happens around his son for the purpose of watching the influence of adults on his son learning. How his son improves on “water” over many, many repetitions is very cool. Even cooler is how similar data modeling can show the national Internet conversation on ideas over time.

Deb Roy directs the Cognitive Machines group at the MIT Media Lab, where he studies how children learn language, and designs machines that learn to communicate in human-like ways. To enable this work, he has pioneered new data-driven methods for analyzing and modeling human linguistic and social behavior. He has authored numerous scientific papers on artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, human-machine interaction, data mining, and information visualization.

Deb Roy was the co-founder and serves as CEO of Bluefin Labs, a venture-backed technology company. Built upon deep machine learning principles developed in his research over the past 15 years, Bluefin has created a technology platform that analyzes social media commentary to measure real-time audience response to TV ads and shows.