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  • Hello and welcome to 6 Minute English. I'm Neil.

  • And I'm Rob.

  • Now, Rob, would you say that you are an introvert or an extrovert?

  • What a good question!

  • Well, extroverts are confident in their personality.

  • They're outgoing and comfortable in social situations.

  • So I would have to say that, if anything, I'm the opposite.

  • I'm more of an introvert. I'm really quite shy.

  • I feel uncomfortable in social situations.

  • For example, if I go to a party where I don't know anyone, I usually feel very embarrassed.

  • And I find it impossible to start conversations with strangers.

  • But you do all of this on the radio and videos for BBC Learning English, don't you?

  • Some would say you have to be an extrovert to do what we do.

  • Ah! Well, maybe I'm pretending to be an extrovert to hide the fact that I'm an introvert.

  • It's quite a common thing, you know.

  • Well, it might not be so easy to hide in the future.

  • Because researchers have developed a computer program that can tell your personality from looking at where you look, by tracking your eye movements.

  • Wow! That sounds pretty hi-tech and scary.

  • Well, we'll learn more shortly, but first a question on the topic of clever computers.

  • The letters "AI" stand for "Artificial Intelligence".

  • But what are the letters "AI"? Are they

  • A) an abbreviation

  • B) an acronym, or

  • C) an initialism?

  • OK, I thought that was going to be easy, but I think it's an abbreviation, isn't it?

  • Well, you'll have to wait until the end of the programme to find out!

  • Sabrina Hoppe is a researcher at the University of Stuttgart.

  • She was interviewed on the BBC Radio programme "All In The Mind".

  • She spoke about an experiment in which they tracked the eye movements of people in real situations.

  • This is what she said about the research.

  • Was she confident the experiment would work in the real world?

  • The main finding in our study is that it's possible at all to just look at eye movements and then predict something about their personality.

  • And before our study, it was not clear at all if this would be possible from eye movements in such an unconstrained real-world setting.

  • So, was she confident this would work?

  • No, not really.

  • She said that before the study, it wasn't clear if it would be possible in an unconstrained real-world setting.

  • "Unconstrained" here means that there wasn't strict control over the conditions of the experiment.

  • It took place in the real-world, so not in a laboratory.

  • The result of the experiment or the "finding", as she called it, was that by following eye movements, a computer program was able to work out the personality of the subjects.

  • Let's listen again.

  • The main finding in our study is that it's possible at all to just look at eye movements and then predict something about their personality.

  • And before our study, it was not clear at all if this would be possible from eye movements in such an unconstrained real-world setting.

  • So how does the software work?

  • For example, what are the differences in the eye movements of extroverts compared to introverts?

  • We still don't really know in detail what makes the difference.

  • We can only tell that there are differences and that we know computer programs that can pick up those differences.

  • Maybe extrovert people look up a lot because they want to look at people's faces.

  • Whereas, some super introvert person maybe just stares at their own shoes.

  • If you want to take the extreme examples.

  • So, probably it somehow changes gaze.

  • But we only know that this information is there and somehow our programme figured out how to extract it.

  • So how does it work?

  • Well, that's the strange thing.

  • She said that she didn't really know, at least not in detail.

  • She did say that our personality somehow changes gaze.

  • "Gaze" is another word for looking at something.

  • So maybe we gaze in different ways depending on our personality.

  • Extroverts may look up more and introverts, like me, may look down more.

  • Yes, it was interesting that she said that she didn't know how it did it.

  • But the program somehow managed to figure it out.

  • The phrasal verb "to figure something out" means "to understand or realise something".

  • Time to review today's vocabulary, but first, let's have the answer to the quiz question.

  • I asked what are the letters "AI"? Are they....

  • A) an abbreviation

  • B) an acronym

  • C) an initialism

  • Rob, what did you say?

  • I said A) an abbreviation.

  • Well sorry, no, "AI" is C), so to speak.

  • It's an initialism.

  • It's the first letters of the words "artificial intelligence",

  • but it's not pronounced like a new word, just the initial letters.

  • Right, time now to review today's vocabulary.

  • Yes. We had the word "extrovert".

  • This describes someone who has a very outgoing personality.

  • An extrovert is confident and socially comfortable.

  • By contrast, an "introvert" is someone who is shy and not comfortable in social situations and doesn't like being the centre of attention.

  • Our report today talked about the findings of some new research.

  • A "finding" is something that has been learnt, discovered, or indeed, found out.

  • It is the conclusion that is reached.

  • Then we had "unconstrained" to describe the experiment which was not carried out in a controlled environment.

  • So "unconstrained" means "not limited or restricted".

  • Our next word was "gaze".

  • This is a word that means "our way of looking at something".

  • Yes, the findings of the research suggest that our personality can affect our gaze.

  • And this was something the computer was able to figure out.

  • To "figure out" means "to study something and reach an answer to a particular question or problem".

  • Right! Well, you know what I've just figured out?

  • Do tell!

  • It's time to bring this edition of 6 Minute English to an end.

  • We hope you can join us again,

  • but until then, we are bbclearningenglish.com,

  • and you can find us on social media, online, and on our app.

  • Bye for now.

  • Bye-bye!

Hello and welcome to 6 Minute English. I'm Neil.

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