Ever try talking to an alien? In the movies, they always speak perfect English. But what if we really made contact? Could we just whip out a universal translator – or even a babelfish – to understand one another?
Let’s say we do learn to communicate: what to say, what to say? We’ll hear the protocol for just how to reply to ET. And, from Klingon to Esperanto: the recipe for creating a language from scratch.
Plus, get ready to babble with your Blackberry: how computers are learning to recognize – and respond – to human speech.
Q1=B4
What does this mean? Listen to the show to find out!
Guests:
- Terrence Deacon – Professor of anthropology and neuroscience, University of California, Berkeley
- Douglas Vakoch – Director of Interstellar Message Composition, SETI Institute
- Donald Boozer – Librarian, Coordinator of Cleveland Public Library’s recent exhibit “Esperanto, Elvish, and Beyond…The World of Constructed Languages”
- Jim Glass – Director of the Spoken Language Systems Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Systems.
Ask MIT’s Jupiter about the weather!
