A bit of non-library related fun

I must apologize for not posting. Sometimes things happen in life, like fires or accidents, and you're the only one near enough to help. That's what's been going on for the last few months. I won't bore you with details, but my wife and I have been taking care of some matters and helping a few people get their lives in better order.

Anyway, here's some fun, and good clean fun at that.

How To Survive A Robot Uprising (aka Robopocalypse)

I suggest you watch carefully and take notes.

Google's Neural Network teaches itself to recognize...cats

Some exciting news last week. Google's simulation of a neural network taught itself how to identify cats after a week of watching YouTube videos. Keep in mind that the network had never been given even a single image labeled as a cat; it was never told what a cat was. It taught itself from unlabeled images.

Besides image recognition, this research will have applications in speech recognition and natural language processing. (As in Google's own version of SIRI).

As soon as the neural network believes that it is itself a cat, the feline conquest of the internet and AI will be complete!




Here's the story: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4376128/Google-neural-network-identifies-cats

Emma2 coming soon...

I haven't been blogging much during the last month. Not due to laziness or boredom, but because I've been working on a new bot, "Emma2," written not in AIML but in ChatScript. ChatScript is a relatively new and very successful language for chatbot creation. So far I'm very pleased with the results. Stay tuned!

Robot with Human Skeleton

Here's something I came across on Twitter and wanted to share. ECCEROBOT is a robot with a structure of mechanical bones, joints, muscles, and tendons inspired by our own human anatomy:

Computers in Libraries 2012, Chatbots 3.2

Spring is the time for presentations and travel. Last month, Emma (infoTabby) and her human friends presented at Computers in Libraries 2012 and at Chatbots 3.2. Both went well. My apologies for not releasing v1-5b as promised; I decided to skip it entirely and move to v1-6 which gathers the majority of the info you need to edit into one file and allows you to set material type attributes. It's good to be home and back to work!

Robots that fly and cooperate and play music

Michele and Emma and I will be speaking at Computers in Libraries 2012 next week, so there hasn't been much time for blogging. However, here's something you might enjoy, flying robots that cooperate and play the James Bond Theme.

Very cool.

Facial recognition technology coming to retail stores

From Click Orlando, Bars, stores to use facial recognition technology to increase sales. If you don't want to read the whole article, here's the gist. In a few weeks some businesses in central Florida will start using enhanced facial recognition technology to cater ads to a shopper's age and demographic. In other words, the store will have billboards that can determine your age and gender, then display ads it thinks you'll like based on your age and gender. If you're a 30 year old woman, you'll see ads for shoes and makeup, if you're a 40 year old man, you'll see ads for lawn mowers and grills. Or turkey deep fryers and socket sets, or whatever. Eventually stores will be able to recognize you as an individual and track your spending habits (like they already do). In fact, the FTC "worries about the time when technology becomes so advanced that your social media profiles are scraped for information." Another reason not to share all those deeply personal tidbits on Facebook or Twitter. No one wants to walk into the grocery and have an artificially intelligent billboard start shouting about the great deal it'll give you on Gas-Ex or Listerine. "Come on and buy it, Chuck! You tweeted that was the reason you couldn't get a date!" To avoid this kind of embarrassment, the FTC predicts that "people will be wearing camouflage so they're not picked up by facial recognition trackers all over the place." Well, who knows. Some people can only see the potential for abuse in new technology. I try to be a bit more optimistic.