Speech Analysis Essay
How to teach machines to read and use the web Benoit Dherin, Director, Keep.com

Last Friday, I listened a speech outside of class. It is Benoit Dherin who is the director of Keep.com and Computer Science. His speech focused appropriately on the issue of applying machine learning for web-content extraction to online retail business. This speech is on May1st,2015,12:30pm, Downtown Campus, Room529. My analysis will focus on how Dherin used the strategies of story-telling, intonation, articulation, pauses, quotation and redundancy to engage and maintain his audience’s interest as well as evoke their sympathy. Utilizing showing the actual action of online retailers during a speech, his introduction captured the audience’s attention; the body of his speech discuss how machine learning can be used to bridge the gap between retailers and web users in an automated way and his conclusion summarized the challenges and solutions involved in teaching machines to explore, mine, and map data on the web.
Director Dherin opened his speech showing the we that contains a multitude of supply and demand. Through showing the audience what the web is like, his aim was directly telling the audience that on the supply side are online retailers, providing product inventories and advertising deals and discounts. Moreover, on the demand side are individual consumers, who clearly express desires, values, preferences, and more via blog, social media and various apps. The number of audience is not too much, so it is much convenient for Dherin to make interaction with the audience. He was in a most humble clear tone, loud enough to be audibly heard. His evidence used was relevant and timely. Before he showed his thesis statement which is how to teach machines to read and use the web, he paused for effect and used short simple sentences in his introduction part to allow his audience to visualize and grasp without ambiguity. When he finally told his statement, with direct eye-contact, Director Dherin successfully attracted the audience’s attention about this topic about computer science issues.
To achieve a warm reception, he assessed his audience and appropriately referenced the mind is a very unusual piece of software,and the best way to understand how a piece of software works. Director Dherin shows his point of view that computers are flexible enough to model the strange evolved convolutions of our thought, and yet responsive only to precise instructions.So if the endeavor succeeds, it will be a double victory which Dherin stated his statement during the speech that human being would finally come to know the exact mechanics of themselves—and they’ll have made intelligent machines. Director Dherin paused appropriately so that the audience had time to think about his topic and his statement showing during the speech.
As the speech moved from the introduction, through the body and onto the conclusion with good verbal transitions, he used an appropriate quotation, “The father of psychology, William James, described this in 1890 as “the most mysterious thing in the world”: How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves?”, to demonstrate the challenges they face nowadays about teaching machines to read and use the web on the supply and demand side. This is the appeal of pathos he used in the speech. He introduced his process he had made recent years about the development of computer translation ability. He used data and statistics to show his main research areas such as mathematical physics, differential geometry, and quantum physics that he worked on about this topic to show the changes. The statistics and data are the most obvious part of logos. Logos appealed ethically and totally support his main idea.
He closed his speech after telling the audience that the problems and solutions he was working on. The solutions he mentioned in the speech concludes teaching machines to explore, mine and map data on the web. As we all know, machine learning is a branch of computer science that enables computers to learn from experience and billions of data and statistics to support the development of this technology. Director Dherin made his conclusion that he was still working on figuring out how to teach machines to read and use the web as same as human beings. He believes in the future, the problems will be solved. From my point of view, the conclusion part of this speech may be ended too soon. The audience may have less connection from what he is saying at the end part. Maybe because of too many academic statistics used in the speech causes me understand a little bit hard. Overall, the speech about How to teach machines to read and use the web by Benoit Dherin, Director, Keep.com let me learn a lot about speech skills and how to not only make connection with the audience, but also show the main points and thesis statement at the introduction and conclusion part.