Slashdot Mirror
What AI Elements Could Improve the Web?
DavidpFitz asks: "I'm entering my final year of my Artificial Intellgience/Computer Science degree at Birmingham Uni. (UK). The trouble is that I can't decide what to do for my final project. I'd like to do something of practical value delivered over the web (things like an intelligent Slashdot filter spring to mind :-), but I always come up with reasons against everything I think of. Can anybody think of ways they would like a web site to react more intelligently that they currently do. Clever shopping carts? More targeted news? Both of these are rubbish, I think - so more interesting and complex ideas are welcome! The main thing, is that it has to have a strong AI element in it, not just appearing to be clever."
Interesting thought. So if we were to apply more AI to the web, what areas should we target? And I feel this is a valid question even if someone may be using these ideas for their school project. These are still just that: ideas. DavidpFitz will have to finish and implement his final project regardless of anything said in this forum, so why not take his line of reasoning, brainstorm a bit and have some fun with it?
The problems of the web that can have AI-type solutions are generally semiotic in nature. We could have intelligent agents, able to pay our bills and do our shopping for us, if we had a system of symbols that mapped clearly and unambiguously to meanings, or, a non-symbol processing system able to decode the web the way a human does. Most likely, we'll get something midway between them.
:^P
The GOFAI idea that human cognition is a matter of disembodied symbol processing is dead, and good riddance. However, our computers remain most useful as symbol processing engines, not as the more complex kinds of massively parralel connection engines that most people think brains are. We can get computers to emulate that kind of brain functionality, but only on a very limited scale compared to the human mind. Human-equal parralel machines are not just around the corner, so we have to augment the connectionist systems we have with symbol processing facilities.
The kind of project that interests me is a system that uses XML formats to provide clear semantics on the web, and connectionist methods to make judgements about how to act in response to those symbols. A system, for instance, that can scan an XML resource for information about rock concerts or movie listings, and having learned in more connectionist ways the preferences of the user (both in terms of costs, scheduling and personal taste) can inform them of events they might like to see, perhaps even going so far as to make tentative reservations when it's very confident.
The same kind of system could be used to solve library research problems. An XML document structures data semantically enough that a connectionist system can make quick, fairly superficial judgements about the contents and how they relate to the research needs of its users. It can then do more indepth readings of the highest confidence documents, leading to better sources and new documents. In the end, it can provide the documents to users and assist them when there are gaps in their knowledge by pointing them to the document that fills the gap.
The killer ap for AI would be automatic translation. Since that's my field, I don't think it's somewhere you ought to go without a strong knowledge of linguistics, and of the past failures in the field. I have some ideas, but that's what my PhD is going to be about.
"UI AI" is, IMHO, an ill-concieved idea that has had way too much work done on it in the past decade. The problem is very simple: if I spend a few minutes (or hours, or days,) learning a new interface, I want it to stay the same! I don't care if I never run "Backup", or if I visit Slashdot so much that it may as well be my home page... I don't want those settings changing unless I tell them to.
MS Office is a notorious example of this. In the newer versions, if you don't use a menu item frequently, it vanishes, so users aren't "confused" by too many options. I used to work tech support, and believe me, having your menus change for no reason is far more confusing than having "too many options"... and it is frustrating to new users and experienced users alike.
MSK
I happen to work at a startup, Links2Go, Inc., which approaches the "better search engine" problem from a different direction than most engines. Instead of farming huge numbers of web pages and doing greps on them for relevant text, our server sorts these pages by topic automatically and rates a page's relevance, not by the number of keywords on the page, but the number of times the page is referenced from other pages.
Users can then search on our servers by topic *or* by the URL of a page. What the user gets back is either a list of the most relevant pages to a specific topic *or* to a specific URL.
George Lee
The web is growing every day with more and more content that is dynamically generated. What we need is something that will at least give search engines a grasp of what's buried under all of that.
Sure, many sites with dynamic content provide an engine that will allow THEIR dynamic content to be searched, but that doesn't help if you're using a major search engine to find ALL the sites with relevant information, not just relevant information on ONE site. We need a way for the engines that search dynamic content to report back to the big search engines what they have in their databases.
And then we can deal with all the security and privacy issues that will probably come with it.
The entire point of the Internet is to relay information. Information must, by definition, be meaningful to its recipient.
I'm sure you all remember the study done a year or so ago reporting that even the best search engines hit only 16% or so of the sites that are actually on the web. Clearly, there is a need for a good AI agent to look for information relating to a query and present that information to its client. Ideally, the client would be able to ask a question like, "Who was the fourth Pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty?" and receive a weighted list of answers (e.g. 85% of sites consulted say it was Seti I).
The data is there. What we need is the means to collect it and turn it into information.
www.alarmist.org
What about an AI that takes a given pool of data (e.g.current news headlines, a collection of images, etc) and creates an electronic image *inspired* by these. I don't mean a random mishmash of whatever it was handed, but rather, identifies some underlying theme in the data and interprets it in an artistic fashion... ok, maybe it's weird or impossible, but I thought it would be cool... probably fairly challenging too.
---
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
Web-controlled nuclear-powered death bots.
But you'd better invest in a good server b/c the site would see a lot of traffic. Well, until enough people had used the death bots anyway.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Several thoughts of mine...
You'd have an AI program with a web based interface.
Or
You'd have an AI enhanced web interface.
One of the former:
A program that digests and characterizes an mp3. Say there is a store of music on a sister server that people can download and listen to, and then score in several ways. Think Cinematch at http://www.netflix.com where people can rank their preferences and get statistically collated with other people who rank their preferences. In this case, though, you correlate tastes of a person with the music. So you ask the person who listens to rank on 1 to 5:
Slow . . . . Fast
Heavy . . . . Light
Sad . . . . Happy
Tense . . . . Relaxed
Simple. . . . Complex
Loved . . . . Hated
Where complex is taken to mean that the song is *both* sad and happy at places, tense and relaxed, etc. So the individual who ranks creates this 6 part characterization of the music, which is fed into some sort of NN and correlated with the music itself, somehow. The end goal would be to feed music into the system and be able to characterize the music correctly *and* decide with good certainty that a person would love a song or not.
It's a selfish goal of mine because there is too much music out there, and I know what I like, but of course I don't know what I haven't heard. Having a device that filters out 70% of the music I like correctly, with the remaining 30% left for variety and error, would be very interesting.
Just one idea!
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Well, it seems that you are not really thinking of web sites. You are thinking about what used to be called "intelligent agents", specifically those which are running remotely and with which you can communicate in HTML. Another word for this would be personalized service with a Web front-end. A search engine is a trivial example of such.
So think about what cool thing can a remotely running program do for you. Find you stuff on the web? That's passe (do you want to code another shopping agent?). Filter news for you? Academia has done some interesting stuff here, not sure it it went anywhere.
You might also want to keep security and privacy in mind when designing your agent.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I've just today finished the last of my 3rd year project at Sussex Uni.
I'm not sure how you'll be assessed, but the thing I found most important was that you are assessed on your report, not necessarily on how well what you do works.
If you can try and target your research to something that will allow a good write up, then you're on to a winner. For example, someone did an email client that attempts to learn what you do with emails. The thing that made the report good was that he was able to test it on different people and collect data and evaluate it.
There needs to be a real push into getting intelligence in educational software (for kids). Most of what I've seen is drek - while some of it is very slick and good-looking, it lacks real educational content. You either do not learn anything, or you learn it once and then repeat it endlessly.
Here's a challenge for your AI - adaptive educational software. Most software today requires the child to 'log in' so it can keep track of their saved games. Go further. Keep track of what the child does, how successful they are, and tailor the next experience accordingly.
Give rewards for progress. Reduce the rewards for continued success at the same level (gradually). Prod them into more difficult problems / puzzles / challenges. Eventually remove the lower, introductory, levels all together. Give different rewards.
Do all this while keeping it fun, and keeping them coming back for more. Pop quizes to keep them sharp - reward those accordingly. More advanced information (kind of like sidebars), when they are ready for it, can appear as options. Almost a tutor / friend relationship.
Teach the young how to learn - what could be more challenging for an AI project?
I realize that neither of these is particularly original, but then neither have they been perfected by anybody; there is still lots of room for improvement, and plenty of scope for adding as much natural-language AI as you like:
:-) Seriously though, it would be useful for busy people who haven't got time to read things from top to bottom. It could have some way of determining which links are relevant, following them, and adding their information to the precis generated (with attributions if necessary). Or you could use it to cut out types of information you don't want - to filter out marketingspeak, if you're a techie, or to filter out techspeak, if you're not.
A precis program which will condense long websites or discussions. Jon Katz's articles on Slashdot might make a useful set of tests, also try to precis the comments posted to them
The other suggestion is a remembrance agent which looks at the website you're reading and suggests links (from your browser history, from search engines or from some big collaborative database) which might be relevant. This might finally be a use for those sidebars that recent browsers seem to have spouted. Again, this has been done before, but it's not something which has been done perfectly. You might also be able to use it as a fact-checker for postings you make to Usenet - although that would be rather difficult to implement, I imagine.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Really?
How about a desktop that learns as you use it, and can predict where you're about to store the file you're working on?
Or one that watches the way your organize your stuff, and the features you use to do it, and doesn't stand in your way when you try but actually HELPS you do it?!
Sure, fixing the OBVIOUS stupidities (all 400 zillion of them) that Windows and GNOME/KDE have would be a nice starting point, but why stop dreaming there?
Wouldn't it be nice if your desktop & apps could actually work together and know at least -something- about where you're keeping your files for a given project? Or what projects and what files are related? Or what features you tend to use and how you use them?
C'mon segmond, use your imagination for crissakes, bringing some AI to the desktop would certainly be useful.