November 16, 2007
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
Posted on Friday November 16, 2007 | Permalink |Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: Video-Gamers Get Their Own Lab at a Virginia Community College
Next: Tech Therapy: College Presidents Should Think About Technology
I think that is so cool. I had to miss a class the other day and with this system I wouldn’t have to ask anybody for notes.
— Drew Nov 20, 03:37 AM #
The MIT CSAIL department has accomplished an exceptionally difficult undertaking and the author’s best example is skipping boring parts of lectures?
— Joe Nov 20, 09:06 AM #