Chatbots 3.1

Who: Bot creators, commercial users, enthusiasts, scientists, students, and the press are invited.
What: Chatbots 3.1 Conference
When: Saturday, April 23, 2011
Where: Suite 3200 (32nd Floor) Two Liberty Place, 50 S. 16th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102
Why: Chatbots have been adapted to nearly every ecological niche on the internet. Bots appear on web pages, in instant messaging, and respond to email and forum posts. They can be found in Second Life, in online games, and in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Bots support marketing and advertising and are used in education. This conference brings together leading experts to discuss their ideas and present the latest technologies and trends in chatbots.

Program

David Newyear - Mentor Public Library - The Cat who Sat Down at the Reference Desk
Robert Medeksza - Zabaware - Ultra HAL Technology in Social Networks
Francis Taney - Buchanan Ingersoll - Legal and IP Issues for Botmasters
Dr. Richard Wallace - Pandorabots - Creating AIML bots that speak and hear
Charles Wooters, Ph.D - NextIT - TBD
Dr. Hugh Loebner - Crown Industries - A.I. and The Future of Society
John McIntire - Warfighter Interface Division, 711th Human Performance Wing, Air Force Research Laboratory - Spotting a bot: Active and passive methods of chatbot detection
John Zakos - MyCyberTwin - The Role of Chat Bots in Social Media
Adeena Mignogna - Riot Software - TBD (tentative)
Rollo Carpenter - Existor - TBD
Jeff Remy - VirtuOz - TBD

Follow this link to register!

Emma hits the road!

Emma's going to hit the road next month. OK, I'm going along and so is Michele McNeal. First stop will be San Francisco where she'll appear at the Innovative Users Group 2011 Conference. Will she favor the audience with some of her cowboy poetry? We'll see. This conference draws librarians from across the U.S. They ought to have some appreciation for her evocative and powerful images of the West.

Next stop will be Philadelphia for Chatbots 3.1 Conference. As a humble librarian, I'm a bit nervous. Emma's going to meet Dr. Richard Wallace and some of the other heavy hitters of the chatbot and AI world. She'll have to be on her best behavior and so will I. We're calling the presentation "The Cat who sat down at the Reference Desk (with apologies to Lilian Braun)" Not sure if I like this title, but that's what it's about, how we ended up with an AI cat at our ref desk. Well, there's time to think about it.

Emma the Cowbot Poet

Here's another:

Campfire ashes.
Pa wouldn't a cared,
Ma's long gone and buried.
Keep ridin' keep ridin' to whiskey!

Emma's writing "Cowboy Poetry"

Maybe winter's gone on just a little too long, or maybe I've made that drive to MPL one too many times. With all the fuss about "Cowboy Poetry" over the last few days, I decided to program Emma to write it. And you know, she's not bad. A sample:

Wind's cuttin'
Pa wouldn't a cared
two markers on the hill
nothin but ashes.

Her randomly generated poems have been programmed to be full of hopelessness, despair, and loss. The results are quite interesting. Besides being fun, this is a good way to learn and to experiment with some more advanced ways of writing .aiml. (More advanced for me, that is.)

Stay tuned for updates. She might be writing "Pirate Poetry" next.

The word of the day: backup.

You can read it, I can read it, but usually the only way one learns is through experience. We lost all of Emma's .html this afternoon. (Those are the files that make her appear on our website and online catalog. They aren't part of her "brain.") So the fun began. I knew I had copies somewhere. On my laptop? No. On one of the big external drives at home? Nope. On, let's see, one of the six or seven flash drives wandering around the house? No, Un uh, nothing, not here, zip, zero, oh here they are! Lesson learned. (I really hate being organized.)

So long kittenhood...

We've been working on licensing Emma for the last few weeks. (I mean the parts of her code that I wrote, the parts that deal specifically with our library.) Not a lot of fun. To be honest, this was the first time I felt depressed or pessimistic about the whole project. Most librarians don't deal with this sort of thing; certainly not ex-brass players currently working as librarians. Anyway, we're done and she'll be licensed in a way that should be a "win-win" for everyone involved. This seems an appropriate place to mark the end of her "kittenhood." To celebrate, I'm going to get a good night's sleep.

Robot hummingbird passes flight tests - too cool!

My wife spotted this in the news, it's on both our Christmas lists.

"A prototype robot spy "ornithopter," the Nano-Hummingbird, has successfully completed flight trials in California. Developed by the company AeroVironment Inc., the miniature spybot looks like a hummingbird complete with flapping wings, and is only slightly larger and heavier than most hummingbirds, but smaller than the largest species."

Check out the video!