I got thinking about the implications of IM-Bots when I worked for the TSSG research group in Ireland. IM-Bots are pseudo-intelligent automated IM buddys that responds to queries using greater or lesser degrees of Natural Language Parsing (NLP) and knowledge inference. One of the most famous is the Alice-Bot which uses Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) to associate semantics (like running a program) with parsed syntax. I’ve written a paper about using IM-Bots as virtual shopping assistants which is available here
Month: February 2005
I doubt if the one of United States’ founding fathers and greatest thinkers would be too impressed with the subtle and blatant curtailing of civil liberties by the enactment of the US Patriot Act. I stumbled across the following quote of Ben Franklin’s earlier today while I was looking for something else. Wise words that the current administration could do with heeding.
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. “
–Benjamin Franklin
More information on Benjamin Franklin can be found here
Just read a great article on wired.com about Microarrays (silicon chips that light up to reveal which genes are active in a DNA sequence). These chips produce huge volumes of information that scientists have found extremely difficult to process and interpret. Enter the helping hand of s/w company Salk Institute. Top code chairman, Jack Hughes, is a paraplegic who also works as director of the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation researching cures for ameliorating spinal cord damage. Top coder is making a search tool in the form of the Gene Chip Data Interface available to all researchers in this field This should enable scientists to better understand the genetic effects of spinal chord damage in particular and microarray data in general.
Categories
Doogle search
Some wags in Trinity College Dublin have hacked up a humorous front end for the google.ie search engine. It’s called Doogle Search. Searches are broken up into categories from the hit Irish TV show Father Ted such as drink, feck, girls & arse. Words are mysteriously appended onto your search from a list of all things Oirish e.g Connemara, shite & Guinness.