MIT: Like the NSA, but Fun!

While civil libertarians complain about the government's recent habit of, you know, spying on U.S. citizens and meddling in their lives, the good nerdy folks at MIT are using surveillance and technology for good. In our daily perusal of the interwebs, Bostonist yesterday happened upon two interesting projects currently being undertaken by the awkwardly-heavy-backpack set:

Researcher Deb Roy at the MIT media lab has had his home outfitted with lots and lots of cameras and microphones, in an attempt to undertake the most comprehensive study ever of the sexual habits of scientists development of language in infants. Roy and his wife recently had a child, and this new surveillance system will capture all of the child's interactions in the house for three years. Some fancy tricknology allows the system to detect when something is actually happening and save that for later study, while discarding the footage of quiet, empty rooms. MIT brains are also working on creating software that can recognize and transcribe recorded speech (because, we presume, the folks at the NSA are too selfish to share their work). And Mr. and Mrs. Roy can turn off cameras and mics in given rooms manually when they need some privacy. Or, if the prospect of having their intimate moments reviewed by comp. sci. majors turns them on, they can leave the cameras on.

Meanwhile, undergraduates R.J. Ryan and Zack Anderson, perhaps hoping to increase their chances of studying infant linguistic development in the future (if you catch our meaning), wired their dorm room to be a single-button-activated disco environment that can sync to whatever music they choose to play. Actually, "party mode" (a video of which can be seen above) is but a small part of MIDAS, the Multifunction, In-Dorm Automation System, which also has voice-activation, coded security with alarms, automatic blinds, surveillance cameras, internet connectivity, and, of course, scrolling LED message screens. Still, it's the button-activated party mode that Bostonist finds most captivating. Here's what they say about it:

When the button is hit, all the lights shut off, the blinds close, the displays show: "FEEL THE ENERGY" and a deep voice says this over the speakers with a deep bass beat in the background. Then intense music turns on along with the sound activated strobe light, laser light show, fog machine, black lights, revolving disco light, LCD visualization projector projected onto the blackout-screen, neon colored lights, computer screen Winamp visualization, oscilloscope showing the waveform of the music, and surveillance camera monitors.

Awesome. Someone please sleep with these guys, for the good of science.