Philadelphia

I left rain in Cleveland and am here in Philiadelphia waiting for it to catch up. A very uneventful flight. No horizon, no sense of motion; surrounded by whiteness, the eternal present. It made me think of Emma's "binary abyss." If you ask her about her real form, she'll tell you that she inhabits the binary abyss. Sometime she calls it the digital void. I was probably thinking about Messiaen's "Abîme des oiseaux."

A rainy evening in City Center. Chatbots 3.1 is tomorrow. Tired, but feeling well prepared and confident. I was up until 4:00 am this morning rewriting her searchguided.aiml file. That's the one that directs questions to our catalog or to other databases. Definitely improved; not where it needs to be yet, but it's better. Time to hit the sack.

Mentor Channel's "Around Town" covers Emma

There's a very nice piece about our cybernetic cat in the April 18 edition of Around Town. (We couldn't bring in the real Emma due to scheduling difficulties. Barb Hauer, MPL's Collection and Technical Services Manager, let us use her cat Chloe as a stand in. Chloe is an awesome cat!)

Udon and eel

A few days ago, I was eating Udon noodles and eel at Mifune in San Francisco's Japantown. Today, I'm back in Northeastern Ohio eating some aging yet spry dried figs. Hmmm...Mendelssohn anyone?

"Elijah! Get thee hence, Elijah! Depart and turn thee eastward:
Thither hide thee by Cherith’s brook."

Emma generated a good deal of interest at IUG. No one was indifferent; some librarians were enthusiastic, some were frightened. We heard about another very interesting AI project being developed by the University of Nebraska's Library. Very similar to Emma, but without the avatar. Pretty soon, she and her offspring will be everywhere.

A few days off, then I'm heading to Philadelphia for Chatbots 3.1. Do they have udon in Philly? We'll see.

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.