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November 16, 2007, 01:16 PM ET
Skipping the Boring Parts of Faculty Lectures
The 1-hour-and-13-minute lecture on “The Birth and Death of Stars” by the MIT physics professor Walter H.G. Lewin is probably really good. But suppose you’re cramming for an exam, and you just want to review the part where he talks about white dwarfs (a type of star)?
MIT students are in luck. Lewin’s lecture not only has been recorded, but MIT has come up with a search engine that scans lectures for key words (like white dwarf) and lets students play just that part of the lecture back. Lewin mentions white dwarfs, for example, at the 9-minute-and-20-second mark.
The search engine, a prototype, was developed at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The system can now search 200 recorded MIT lectures, in video and audio, and the technology could be adopted at other universities.
The search engine is based on speech-recognition software that, MIT researchers say, gets four out of five words in a lecture correct. —Josh Fischman
Categories: Teaching, Search-Engines
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