News Category: faculty-news

Even digitized, unprocessed sound collections, which hold important cultural artifacts such as poetry readings, story telling, speeches, oral histories, and other performances of the spoken word remain largely inaccessible.

Have you noticed that Dr. Bias has been gone since June 1? (If you have not noticed, please don't tell him.) Randolph has been off on a Faculty Research Assignment at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC). With his time there about up, we asked him to share with us how his experience has been.

Sam Burns: So, what have you been doing in Pensacola, mostly just fishing and sunbathing?

Randolph Bias: Yep, that's all.

Millions of gigabytes of sound are stored on servers across the Internet in the form of digital files containing music, spoken word, and video. This explosion of available digital sound recordings is a boon to cultural scholars, but searching through the files for discernible patterns is like looking for needles in a haystack.

Most people assume that Amazon.com's massive online workforce is anonymous, but a study by researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and five other universities has uncovered a security vulnerability that makes it relatively easy to uncover many workers' personally identifying information.