Week 6

So todays lecture we started by watching a Ted talk by a man called Deb Roy from MIT. Deb Roy
wanted to build a database of his families life while his son was learning how to speak, so he built a
"home recording system" that record audio and video in every room in his house. Without a meaning
behind doing this, it comes off a little creepy but the things he was able to find by doing this was amazing. He was able to identify the noise his son would make to indicate water, "Gaga" and then take the audio of any time his son would say "gaga", then he was able to show the process of his son learning how to say water. But not only that he was able to see where his son would learn words the most, he called these "social hotspots" and even further than the he was able to create what he called "Wordscapes". Wordscapes are like 3D graphs that create spikes that look like mountains in areas where a word of said the most. Now the presentation takes a very interesting turn and uses this in order to see and record how social interactions work through social media on topics such as TV. They were able to create visual representations of people commenting on social media and then linking them to a TV program, through this they were able to see the different threads of conversations that people had on the topic. This opens up huge potential in marketing and advertising, as well as being able to learn how people interact on social media. The presentation was oddly personal which made everything just a little bit more meaning full and it was able to captivate me just a little bit more because of it.

Paul then started to go on to talk about the "Internet of Things" (IOT) a phrase supposedly coined by
Kevin Ashton. The IOT is a network connected to electronics that can exchange data between them, it means the Internet is tied to more than just your computer, Paul gave examples of fridges that tell you when your food goes out and wine coolers that tell when your wine is cold. But even now a days cars have Internet access, I have sat in a friends cars and watched youtube on a screen where the radio it meant to be. But not only that your phone connects to the Internet and then you can connect your phone to other devices, for instance my younger brother is selling wireless, waterproof speakers meant to be used in the shower for his A-Level business studies class. You can connect your phone to the speaker and use to play your music off of it, even if it is on an app like spotify.

One of the last things that Paul talked about was Cloud storage. Clouds are huge data farms connected to the internet so you can save files and data to the internet and access then whenever you want as long as you are connected to the internet. This is something that I think that if a individual were too travel a lot cloud storage would an extremely handy, instead of using memory pens or external hard drives that you can loss. But I heard of a very interesting way that Nintendo are looking to use them for there up and coming console. Nintendo are looking to use clouds in such a way to give Console much more processing power. But not only but it can use the Internet to use other consoles and use them to help them render games. However unfortunately this information my not be correct due to the source but I'm going to leave a link to it here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rulXqo0XB9c (Obviously I don't take credit)