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Well folks for a about a week I’m off to Barcelona to attend Evolang, a conference focused on studying the origins and evolution of language. Whether through fossil records, primate studies or computer simulation the guys here are all working on this fascinating challenge. Bizarrely, they’ve let me come along and I’ll be giving a presentation on this paper, about removing ‘mind-reading’ from the Iterated Learning Model (ILM). The ILM is basically a computer simulation where through conversations between adult and child ‘agents’ we can observe the emergence of a compositional communication system, a key feature of human language. As our ability to string together words to convey complex meanings (compositional) is different from one utterance meaning one thing (like an animal alarm call). Anyway, it promises to be a fascinating event, though I have to admit when I saw this view from the plane, I really wished I’d bought my mountain bike along.
There are sinister goings on in my nondescript research lab, deep within the first floor people are being made to wear funny hats or walk around with water bottles strapped to their back. Why? Well at great personal risk I can reveal that most of my colleagues are involved in biometric research. Specifically, gait analysis and ear biometrics – identification at a distance. Similar to automatic number plate recognition, automatic people recognition is the ultimate goal of this research. Everybody has a unique walking style, a unique face and a unique set of ears, all of these can be picked up by CCTV and used to tag and track your movements. So are my colleagues stripping away our last vestiges of privacy, providing a useful tool for our overstretched security services or will the whole thing turn out to be unworkable outside of the lab. Only time, and a variety of silly hats, will tell.
