The Fist Of The Sender: How Much Does Typing Reveal About Us?
With Andrew Rosenberg
Director of the Computational Linguistics Program at the
CUNY Graduate Center
Friday, July 31 @ 11:30 am
@ The Columbia Startup Lab
When we type, we engage in a complicated series of actions beginning with cognition progressing through sentence planning and ending with the physiological mechanics of our fingers striking keys. In this talk, Andrew will present results investigating what qualities about people, and our writing processes are revealed through our typing.
To some degree, how we type is unique to who we are. Through examination of keystroke dynamics, passwords can be made more reliable. Moreover, this talk will describe the use of typing as a continuous security measure, where the identity of a typist is regularly verified via his or her typing behavior. While this is not as reliable as, say, a fingerprint, analysis of typing data is a very reliable authentication biometric.
Beyond uniquely identifying a typist, we also investigate which (if any) demographic qualities are revealed through a person’s typing. This talk will present work recognizing whether a typist is left- or right-handed, male or female or whether he or she is a native speaker of English.
Finally, we investigate qualities of the typing process that may reveal aspects of the cognition and mechanics of typing. In this work, we attempt to recognize what kind cognitive process a typist is engaged in. I will also discuss typing dynamics in and around revisions and multi-word expressions (e.g., compound nouns, compound verbs, idioms) insofar as this may be informative to self-editing and lexical retrieval processes.
Andrew Rosenberg is an assistant professor at CUNY Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently the Director of the Computational Linguistics program at the CUNY Graduate Center. The focus of his research is on how language production characteristic carry and convey information. In speech this involves analyzing prosody (intonation), in text analyzing typing behavior. He is a member of IEEE, ISCA and ACL. In 2014 he was awarded an NSF CAREER grant titled “More than Words: Advancing Prosodic Analysis”, and a Junior Faculty Research Award in Science and Engineering from CUNY. His lab is supported by NSF, DARPA, IARPA, and AFOSR.