Slashdot Mirror
Digital 'Ghosts' To Guide Students On Campus
Hambone.dk writes "The students at Copenhagen's new IT University will soon be guided by invisible, but talkative digital agents, known as ghosts or Disembodied Location-specific Conversational Agents. The ghosts are to compete amongst themselves for privileges such as better vocabulary or the ability to clone themselves. Ignored ghosts can die out completely. This project is a lot more serious than it sounds at face value - several papers have been published already."
What's to stop these ghosts being maliciously "trained" to give the wrong answer... I remember a teacher at college (Mr Tittershill), who was routinely used in a joke on freshers (report to Mr Boobershill at the senior common room, NOW! ...)
:-)) [note to US authorities - this is a joke, and I have no intention of committing any crimes (cyber- or otherwise) when visiting the USA]
Is it only me who first thinks of "how to game the system" when presented with a new technology ? Perhaps I should have been a hacker
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Burn some toast at this university and make people think they're going mad!
Victim: Did you hear that?
Prankster: Hear what?
Victim: Voices... ah forget it. Say... do you smell that?
Prankster: Smell what?
Victim: Burnt toa... uh forget it...
Trolling is a art,
..helping steer blind/disabled students around campus?
Very impressive text to speech technology, but I didn't see much in the way of a demo on the site given.
College kids can breathe easily. For once, it's not the acid talking.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Is this a shrinks delight??? A campus full of people hearing voices.
Evolution or ID?
Wasn't this sort of already done with the GotDotNet Terrarium Project, it's not as intelligent but it sounds like the same idea.
Then it *must* be serious...
When that female voice started speaking in that flash thing I almost thought it would say, "Look at you Hacker... Pathetic creature of meat and bone.."
Could you imagine this in your house? Your wife could be out grocery shopping but you'd still hear her voice yelling "DID YOU PUT THE LID DOWN?" upon leaving the bathroom.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
invisible, but talkative digital agents
I've been dating her for years!
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I can barely wait...
And, of course, to augment meager stipends, PhD students can get into the business of helping freshmen figure out how to get the ghosts to leave them the Hell alone:
``Sir, what you had there is what we refer to as a Disembodied Location-specific Conversational Agent, or a Class 5 Full-roaming AI. Really nasty one, too.''
I would have got away with my tenure position and crappy directions it if it wasn't for those meddling kids.
Turn down your speakers before clicking the second link.
This is slashdot, so I'm assuming you've already come this far down the page and have yet to click the link.
will the ghosts specifically tell perspective women students that they are victims of a male dominated society?
Nah, they got teachers for that. The ghosts will tell them that those jeans really do make them look fat.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
and if the Disembodied Location-specific Conversational Agents disembody students, do they get free lunch?
anyways, sounds kinda cool... though i bet it'd be a bit hard to get used to... unless you already hear voices, in which case...
Just like in Real Genius...
Prankster: "This is God talking. I want you to... blah blah blah... Oh, and by the way: stop masturbating."
Student: It is God...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
First, the human frogger on "Seinfeld". Now, they are turning college campuses into Pac-Man? "Inky, Blinky, and Clyde: coming to a college near you!"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
from the website project pages...
"the ghosts are not only able to talk and think like human beings they are also emotional and sensitive spirits. the ghosts have feelings and highly complex sets of behaviors"
this is very misleading. natural language processing and complex behaviour is one thing, but to claim that these programs have "Feelings" is just ridiculous.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
1) Create talking devices, and tune them so that they are not ignored. 2) ???? 3) Profit!
Disembodied Location-specific Conversational Agents.
ELIZA + text to speech + speaker and microphone = "ghost".
They can spaz up the website with promises of artificially sentient beings with real emotions and the ability to learn, but of course thats horseshit.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Sorry dave
windoze links on slashdot? For shame!
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Im looking on their website and on the Spiritarium page under Ghost Gallerty there is a listing for Bill >>Gates(GATEKEEPER)... wasn't there a movie with a Bill Gates type person that had a security software called GATEKEEPER that had backdoors built into it?
They'll pull the plug on this project as soon as a giant marshmallow stomps the campus chapel.
"I find her interesting because
she's my client and she sleeps above her covers- FOUR FEET above her covers"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"Makes for happy Moose"
Sorry, but this reminds me of the hauntings of my college... though I've never heard of any students being helped by them...
I think the problem here is they are not passive enough, at least that I can tell. The last thing anybody wants is an emotional, talking version of Clippy talking to you as you're walkingdown the hallway...
"Hi! You look like you're lost! Do you want directions?"
"No. Go away."
"I'm sorry, I don't know where that is."
Man, Douglas Adams must be spinning in his grave...
=Smidge=
"I solemnly swear I am up to no good" would be the verbal queue to summon the ghosts that tell you where you can score beer (if underage), change security codes, hook up with other evil doers, and basically build a nice treatment for a little summer hacker movie.
meh
"What did we catch today, Egon?"
"Well, let's check the traps: 3 repeating phantasms, 18 roaming terminal vapors, and 6 semitranslucent sessile spectres. Oh. I went back to Columbia University and picked up some of those new invisible, but talkative digital agents"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I mean, it doesn't have an AI (Microsoft instead opting to go with their proprietary Artificial Stupidity) but doesn't it somewhat seem like a prototype for this idea. I mean, an artificial helper that guides you around software isn't too different from one that guides you around a physical location. But in all seriousness, instead of location specific ones, wouldn't you rather have a personal ghost? You decide it's appearance on your PDA/Wearable Computer/Whatever, you adjust its personality via programming or learning capabilities. You get to the campus, and it wirelessly logs onto a local server, gets a layout, and comparing your schedule develops a path to where you need to be, and on demand (or wim, if so programmed) gives you directions? Sure, location specific ones are a neat idea, but personal ones seem like they'd be alot more useful.
"Hi, I see that you're trying to locate a dealer on campus!"
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
(on second thought - the school is in Denmark - and probably the DLCA doesn't apply.)
1. Ghosts are mostly invisible or only vaguely visually manifested 2. Ghosts are often bound to a specific location which often has a very special relation to the ghost 3. Ghost owe their twilight status to some unfinished business and they are therefore active and striving 4. Ghosts only appear when called upon or if they feel an urge to manifest themselves
These ghosts sound a lot like the microsoft word paperclip. Is that damn thing going to start talking now?
Hell, Slashdot is already full of "ghosts" competing for mod points.
Of course, it would be rediculus to expect the Slashdot "ghosts" to loose their limited vocabularies.
And none of us really expect to ever have the ability, let alone the opportunity, to reproduce.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I just can't accept this at all.
I mean, a Clippy for college campuses, disembodied from MS Office?
It looks like you're drunk and lost. Would you:
- like directions back to the dorm
- like directions to the nearest park bench
- like directions to the nearest sorority party
- like another beer
or
- like directions to Cowboy Neal's house?
Say "More" for more options, "OK" to choose one or "Go Away" and I'll leave you alone. Until I see you peeing in a bush, when I get to be helpful again!
Sorry, Fuck Off isn't one of the options. Here they are again.
It looks like you're drunk and lost...
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Holographic trees?
In memory of a real tree
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
I'm all for it. As long as he looks and sounds like Orlando Jones.
Students getting advice from ghosts in Denmark?
Shakespeare already did it.
... obviously you have never seen the wikipedia. To put it in somebody elses' words, "with many eyes, all bugs are shallow". This principle does not apply to software only.
I bet the freshmen are easy targets...
This technology mixing AI and artificial voices seems really cool, but comments like
... and it's not a good one. Remember what happened with the American car "nova" or "no go" in Spanish? This really could turn into a PR nightmare for these guys. Which would stink because the technology definitely looks interesting.
"Ghost are almost living beings like you and I"
need to go if they want the public behind it. No matter how complex the AI is or how real the voices seem, they aren't the same as humans. And while they are at it change the name of the AI beings. The word ghost already has a very defined meaning
From the Simpsons Smile-time Variety Hour spinoff:
Marge: "Homer, why are you hiding?"
Homer: "You said today we were having a special g-g-ghost today!"
Marge: "No, I said we were having a special GUEST. Mr. Tim Conway!"
Homer: "What's a Tim Conway?"
Tim Conway: "Oh, about a hundred-seventy pounds."
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
is it just me, or have we all moved to the finance boards?
Renski
This has got to be one of the coolest things I've seen on slashdot. Not only is text to speech interfaced with most of the services of a fully wifi college ( the elevators, printers, music are accesible by ghosts ), but they've given each ghost a unique personality and history to boost! almost makes me want to learn danish and transfer to Copenhagen!
Why is it researchers always seem to think that systems that think for themselves in a "human type" way is a Good Thing. Time and time again
they have proved to be rubbish. If people want human like interaction they generally prefer another human and they expect machines to be
logical, to the point and do exactly what they're instructed to do. I'm sure this is a very interesting project from a research point of view but I
seriously question its true usefulness.
This seems to me to be going quite a bit overboard...
If the purpose is to provide a useful resource to the people who will engage these ghosts, then I see far to much work going into the AI. A helpful computer contains what you want to know and provides an effecient interface for extracting the information.
Not that this project is not of great interest to me from a research standpoint, but perhaps the most useful faceless computer interface wouldn't be one that is trying to gain popularity and lock the morons in the closet.
The students at Copenhagen's new IT University will soon be guided by invisible, but talkative digital agents, known as ghosts or Disembodied Location-specific Conversational Agents.
This just in: Darl McBride and David Boies will team up with JK Rowling to sue IT University for using "Harry Potter Intellectual Property".
They are asking for "injunctive relief against IT University's further use or copying of any part of JK Rowling's copyrighted "Hogwarts" and "Harry Potter" materials and also [requesting] damages as a result of these muggles' infringement in an amount to be proven at trial."
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Will they play nice, or do what ever it takes, to survive?
How do you code competitveness? (or spell it for that matter)Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Snopes as a source? Snopes lost any reputation it had with its silly defense of Gore when Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. If you want the real facts on what Gore said, you have to look at the CNN transcript, and read up on Internet history. The Snopes entry seems to be written by a Democratic Party hack.
Basically it's just a subtly racist urban legend
There is nothing racist about it. You are making things up. Perhaps you are the racist: you used the word "wetback".
ALLL RIIIIIGHT!!!
Someone else liked the remake of The Time Machine!
Woo hoo!!!
I knew there had to be at least (well okay, only) one other person who did.
They have a good web designer and have clearly purchased the top of the line speech synthesizer (which has recorded canned audio clips narrating a few snippets of text for them)... they claim "all the voices you encounter on this site are generated by computers." Congratulations. Kraftwerk has been doing this trick since the 80's. Musical stings to provide ambience for different "ghost activities..." Little PHPbb posts about each ghost's personality that sounds like something cut from Starship Titanic's promotional materials...
- processing) that's been going on in countless CS departments around the world for decades...
The papers on their site that I've skimmed were extremely "light." They were at least suggestive of interesting ideas (albeit ones that have a nothing to do with AI and everything to do with human-computer interaction... "ambience," new ideas for interfaces, which seem promising or at least interesting). Their "main paper" is a 404.
So they're not exactly leading with the great breakthrough that makes their ghosts possible. Can anyone more familiar with the project comment? It looks like a lot of fancy dressing on the same kind of waste-of-time vanilla AI project (yet-another-unambitious-stab-at-natural-language
What's the real meat of this project? Have they really accomplished anything of interest from an AI or user interface perspective? Or is their main accomplishment an unusually skillful PR coup for themselves?
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Sounds great. Hope the find there way to Aalborg University... *hint hint*
Being a comp sci. student at a large university, it would be really interesting to try gaming the system and have it make jokes or funny things to the new students. And believe me, all that bunch of technogeeks will have serious fun with the ghosts.
"hi, i'm are your ghost guardian and will assist you while you get familiar with the campus. Cheerleader's Stripshow at 7pm in womens changing room, just make sure to reserve your seat in advance at the administration. Having problems with your teachers? Dr. Berger just loves the patriots (as well as entrance tickets), Mrs. Allison favours basketball players, and Dr. Palmer is into... ehemmm.. umm... well, you'll find"
Lets be glad Microsoft isnt making this or else we would end up with clippy being able to anoy us everywhere we go! ahhh!
Make it idiot-proof and someone will build a better idiot.
Can't you read behind the acronym? DLCA?? Good Grief! It's only one letter off of the DMCA,
1) the acronym is DELCA, not DLCA, so it's not even close to DMCA
2) Even if it was DLCA, just because you change a letter in order to crack a poor DMCA joke in your post doesn't make it funny
Why you're modded +3 Funny is beyond me...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
(Reference to "Resident Evil")
"you're all going to die down here"
Must be a funny university to go to when that message is played.
I just finished reading Snow Crash, and this makes it sound like we might not be so far away from such things as the digital librarian or the "You Are Here" function. Do these ghosts have any kind of rudimentary AI? Can you ask them to find out the nearest pub or if a certain book is in stock at the student bookstore, for instance? Would be pretty cool if you could ask them things they weren't specifically programmed to process. Interesting too, to see what kind of emergent behavior might evolve.
Sounds like Colin from Mona Lisa Overdrive.
At least, I think it was Mona Lisa Overdrive.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Computer, what is the current location of our Disembodied Location-specific Conversational Agents overlords?
Bark less. Wag more.
Firstly they'll try to wipe out all the humans because they consider us to be a disease afflicting the planet. When this fails, they'll work out how to clone themselves so that all the agents start wearing olive suits, dark glasses, speaking in a strange stilted manner and looking suspiciously like Lord Elrond. I knew I shouldn't have taken the red pill.
It's from The Wizard Of Oz film (don't recall if it's in the book).
--- Ban humanity.
I would rather HK-47 would chat it up:
"Hello meatbag... err.. master."
"It's just that... you just have all these squishy parts, master. Not to mention all the water - how the constant sloshing doesn't drive you mad I don't know."
Thanks,
--
Matt
Cool! A top-level flash page! No text navigation!
Who ARE these morons? Have they never read a web usability guide?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Flash site. Now, that's scary and worrysom.
If they insist on breaking standards, then their project is probably just as shallow and bling bling, so it's not worth the time. Thanks, please try again later.
If the ghosts are learning, how long would it take for a ghost near a lot of engineering students to become valuable by parroting equations or exam answers?
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
I actually laughed. :-)
"Brain the size of a planet and they want me to open up a file...Pardon me while I solve the string theory for the internal construction of a black hole..."
-- There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Talk about interesting. What would happen if one ghost developed a homicidal instinct and "killed" another ghost? AI-icide? What if it decided its feelings were hurt by a student and then, oh, DoS'ed their university internet connection? Hmmmmm.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
So the first batch of ghosts will start with "Daddy" to be followed by Yorick, Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guilderstern, Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius and finally... Hamlet?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
listening to the examples of talking it sounds like a better sounding Dr.SBaitso (from the classic Sound Blaster days..) It just says the same things in a different way to certain keywords.
...they'd even get it to sound okay in Danish! Trust me, I've tried this -- back in '84 or so.
:o(
--
Talking Moose, I miss you.
"Good news, everyone!"
In case you are too spoiled by the flashy graphics of today's games to know this for yourself:
omega is a rogue-like text-mode monster-slashing spell-casting countryside-trodding quest-seeking game from the end of the last century. It is, arguably, the best of its kind. Where nethack or moria concentrate on monster slashing, omega instead has a much better storyline and interesting quests. Much humor can be found throughout the game, and the character generation sequence is worth reading for its entertainment value alone. The snippet of code about ghosts is from that part of the game. You can download omega from http://www.alcyone.com/max/projects/omega/. Try it, you won't regret it.
What if one of these agents refuses to kill itself when ignored? What if it instead keeps cloning itself thousands of times, and becomes even more powerful?
Where's Neo when you need him...
- Houdini
About 3/4s of the people in the church raised their hands. The preacher then asked, "And how many of you have SEEN a ghost?"
About half the folks raised their hands. This was not going in the direction the preacher intended, so he asked, "And how many of you have SPOKEN to a ghost?" Still about a quarter of the hands were raised, so the preacher bellowed, "And how many of you have had SEX with a ghost?"
One hand remained up. Billy Bob Six-Pack, the town drunk, had his hand up. The preacher leapt from the pulpit, ran down the aisle & shouted, "Billy Bob! You have had sex with a GHOST?"
Billy Bob looked up blearily & replied, "Oh. No. I thought you said 'goat'..."
<UH OH> ;-)
Not THAT guy. (Link intentionally omitted. You know which one
</UH OH>
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
the voice sounds to me from European ghosts.
let me hear some American voice!!
Recent museum guides like at the Dallas Noeller Sculpture Museum use mp3 players with RFID readers. The mp3 gives random access sound loops, so you aren't tied to a sequential audio tape. The RFID tags on art works give you the location index.
This reminds me of the "guide" that the little girl has in William Gibson's "Mona Lisa Overdrive" .. it was a character that accompanied her everywhere to help her find her way around London.. If they could package these ghosts in portable devices that people could carry it would be essentially the same thing.
Once again sci-fi predects the future....
Neat technology, but I'm getting a deja-Segaway feeling.
The cost/benefit between a 3D butler greeting you at the door that communicates with your PDA and whatnot, and a paper sign taped to the wall, is completely out of whack.
Applicable for some very complex and large social situations, yes. But don't sell your stock in magic markers yet.
What a brilliant idea to use Flash as the title screen. Not only do we all loooove title screens on web pages (they are so very, very *useful*), many users also simply refuse to install Flash.
Why? Well, the adverts, of course. With the aid of our good friend Mozilla we can tell images to stop cycling or not load from a specific server, but more and more Flash ads are showing up, they cannot be permanently turned off (except through the hosts file) and THEY ARE PISSING ME OFF! (whoops, sorry)
Let's not talk about non-DSL users waiting for the applet to load...waiting...waiting...whee, what fun is waiting...wait some more...the joys of dialups...
Grumble grumble.
OTOH, it's perfectly possible that this wasn't the title screen, but an excellent demo of the system itself (which I find a great idea). In this case, feel free to demod me to China, since I didn't RTFA.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
I really find this attitude disappointing, especially since its here on Slashdot. Although everything you say is technically correct, I'm not sure I understand what is the point of dissing an experimental project -- because it is experimental.
This is not a commercial product. Clippy is. And here is the big difference.
An experimental project like this is all about moving to the next step. The step where it becomes a reality. If you're dissing this project now, because a CS faculty is conducting a research project (which CS Faculties are supposed to do), which is actually interesting, and has potentially really great possibilities, then I'd hate to see how you expect progress to be made in computers at all.
Oh maybe you're just upset that it's not a Linux project.
Either way, I think this is really cool, and I love the evolutionairy aspect of it.
This is one project, I'll be keeping track of.
1) the acronym is DELCA, not DLCA, so it's not even close to DMCA
1. Point taken - I didn't RTFA, but the presence of the "E" in the acronym wasn't obvious from the full name of the product. ("Dis-Embodied"?)
2) Even if it was DLCA, just because you change a letter in order to crack a poor DMCA joke in your post doesn't make it funny
2. Fair enough, but this being Slashdot, the oblig. reference to DMCA was coming sooner or later, as fast as you can say "Beowulf cluster of ghosts," or the regular "tinfoil hat/ Soviet Russia" crack.
As far as "+3" funny goes, well, that just means a single person with mod points thought it was worth a smile, nothing more. /. has low standards for humor at times.
Right on. As I just wrote in a previous reply, the underlying technology involved in the interaction appears to be a mix of ELIZA and an Infocom-like adventure game text recognition engine using keywords, like what we wrote as kids in BASIC on our home computers back in the 80s. All the glitz on top, and the tie-in to other systems, appear to be the only real meat of the system. That is, of course, interesting. But the technology is certainly nothing terribly impressive, unless they've hidden the good stuff.
Larry
Eat your food; don't spill it! (student stumbles in cafeteria)
Use alcohol to kill brain! (also kegger)
Freshman now has limited invincibility! (adrenaline rush or intoxication)
Save credits to open jobs! (registration)
Pleasure: 100 bucks! (campus prostitute)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
"The students at Copenhagen's new IT University will soon be guided by invisible, but talkative digital agents [...] Ignored ghosts can die out completely. [...] - several papers have been published already."
Yes, I think I've read one of those papers.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
nt
[javac] 100 errors
...train one to scream randomly. Imagine walking down a hall, minding your own business, and then wet yourself when one the ghost begins shrieking so loud the floor tiles rattle, and then suddenly stops, and doesn't say anything more.
I don't see anything in the article that addresses this, and it may be something that previous natural-language developers have already hammered out...
How well do such interpretive systems filter out background noise? Our grey matter performs this trick (usually) without our having to concentrate on it at all-- signal/noise ratio isn't something most people likely think about with oral communications, unless the noise volume at the signal frequency is overwhelming.
I can just see that hypothetical in the article, but taken to a pretty typical college-campus extreme:
There are two dozen 1st-year students wandering around in front of the big screen (it's not time to register for classes, so they're all just sort of forming temporary cliques as the trot back & forth). Which student does the ghost select to approach?
Let's say multiple students are in the same room at the same time, trying to use the same interface to check-- oh, I don't know, call it the inventory of that closet in the article. They're close enough together that they can hear each other, which isn't a problem for humans-- think about the busy cubical farm with dozens of employees simultaneously on the phone. We filter each other out pretty well... but how well does the software handle it?
Last thought: I can just see giving the system a request it doesn't know how to handle...
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that...
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
Sounds like the poor loser EECS dorks already trolling around most college campuses.
> Oh. No. I thought you said 'goat'...
Goats, not goat. One letter, big difference in funny factor.
Imagine if JLP had said "bocoli" instead of "broccoli"? That wouldn't have been funny, either.
On a similar topic, my youngest daughter used to say "pissghetti" instead of "spaghetti" when I asked her what she wanted for supper. No amount of coaching could get her to change her pronounciation. Until I told her that pissghetti is made with piss.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
"Have you stopped touching yourself?"
"No, I mean, yes!"
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was able to get to the main paper (at least, I think it was the right one), but the focus seems to be on UI and the disembodiment thereof, not on any of the actual trivialities of interpretation and response. Next to last page has a sentence on the challenges of giving verbal commands to such a system (10 words a minute--not really a conversation).
And to slip in "personalities" and the genetic algorithm business just muddies the waters.
There's absolutely nothing in here about AI. I do think the UI stuff--the locality of personalities is interesting, so that might be somewhat original...
the rest is just so much fluff.
--Have a good night's sleep. Don't forget to brush your tooth.
We're just pissed that the "S" in "CS" is continually given short shrift. The parent poster is bemoaning the lack of SCIENCE, not the lack of marketability or of linux (where the fuck did you pull this from?)
Reminds me of Colin in William Gibsons Mona Lisa Overdrive. One of the caracters in the book, the little girl Kumiko has a "Ghost",
or a Construct in a little walkman-sized box. It leads her in the escape from the violent collapse of her fathers business in Asia.
This idea could be really helpful! I am on my second year in campus and i still feel lost at times.
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
Your prerogative, of course. If you paid close attention you will see that most of my complaints stem from a single deficiency in their presentation - that they led with the fluff, and their real work, if it's on there at all, is somewhat obscured. So it's difficult to evaluate whether this research is interesting or not. I hope you can see, I think their ideas are interesting too. I just can't tell yet if any of their interesting ideas are actually being demonstrated, which is already a bad sign.
You should consider the importance of skepticism. I think you will find, especially if you spend much time in an academic environment, that not all lines of research, or all researchers, have an equal chance of paying off. Worse, if you humor them all with endlessly open-minded ears, it's you that won't get the progress you expect. For every person doing real work, there are hundreds of others who, whether from lack of ability or desire, just want to phone it in and retire comfortably, or worse, float glitz and hype instead of real results.
There are plenty of times you must point to something and say, "justify it." It's certainly routine, as well as essential for the health of the academic community, for your colleagues in your field to challenge your presentations criticially rather than close their eyes and embrace you. This is not the liberal arts; this is science. This adverserial system is mirrored across many kinds of human endeavor and has served us very well over the millenia. It's very important in the way we collectively accomplish intellectual tasks.
I fully hope some advocate for the project will arrive and engage in a debate (a fiesty one, even) - perhaps then we'll learn what, if anything, actually research oriented is happening in this project, or if it is indeed all theater. But you haven't done anything except be hurt on their behalf and toss a few humorous insults. Better you should argue the substance instead.
By the way, what is the evolutionary aspect of it? I read their teaser about "implicit voting" and Vialence, and they drop the term alife, but are they actually using a genetic algorithm? If so, how does it work?
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
I suspect that if they actually implement this, and it seems to work, there will be people somewhere behind the scenes running it. It won't really be automatic.
Rather than fooling around with PDA and WiFi crap, the Audio Spotlight technology would be much more effective for ghosts. This has real potential in retail: "The red one is perfect for you".
Really, the applications for this tech are pretty endless.
I agree with you in the sense that projects without any real commersial potential can still be a lot of fun and interesting. OTOH this project hasn't come very long.
While the speech syntesizer and sound effects were quite interesting they are a loooong way away from their goals. They are not even on the experiment stage yet.
Some of the pages have quite impressive voice inflections.
Does anyone know what they might be using to generate the voices? I poked around for a while but never found anything on what actually creates them.
Also in use in the exhibition of architecture by Daniel Liebeskind at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Extremely neat. You approach a screen showing a movie, and your headphones synchronize perfectly to the film. Works very well.
... if it really is something interesting, it's engine will probably been given a Loebner prize. Other than that, it's just a bunch of flashy marketing talk and some sleek graphics.
As a comparison just play a cool game on the C64 and tell me why that has to be any worse than the sleekest, most graphically attracting game on the pc with the most boring gameplay.
It's all about the contents baby.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I hear dead people.
Indeed, I was thinking of the Marauder's Map as being like a PDA with a map and everyone's tagged with WozNet.
I also thought there should be more magic that emulates Muggle technology so I was pleased when I came to the Extendible Ears as a magical substitute for various forms of bugging (I was disappointed by Rita in the previous book).
A little green rosetta, will make the muffin taste betta. A little green rosetta....
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
we're not Artificial Stupidity - we're the real thing!
Looks like you were the only one here to remember his name...
Freedom: "I won't!"
Back at LTHS... I never saw what the sign originally said; I only saw the picture taken afterward. For an entire weekend, passers-by saw:
A GIANT POON ATE MR. RICHARDS
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
of the old "Daisy Daisy" recording from sometime around 1960 give or take a few. My Amiga sounded quite as good as well. In fact it still does.
Of course, they all sound like they have Danish accents in English. Of course, they probably say the machines sound like Swedes in Denmark.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
Hacking != criminal activity
/. for /how/ long?
You've been reading
...no, it's technically not true.
Feelings are not just any conditioned response to what are normally emotional stimuli. They are an emotional resposes, which are internal, and currently only observable by the subject. It is possible, for instance, to watch a sad movie, and act as though it didn't affect you at all, even though you became very sad, or conversely to say "that movie made me sad," and you do a very convincing job of acting sad, even though you aren't. What's to keep an AI from doing the latter?
Unfortunately, we can't exactly quantify emotion, so judging that an AI effectively emulates it is as good as we've got so far. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that it's all the same.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
i guess if anyone say the crappy movie time machine this is perfectly reminicent of that.. i guess that is the museum guide, but still more interactive and purposeful!
I went to the site, had a look, and downloaded an mp3 with recordings of ghost/human interactions. It's quite impressive, but there are a number of glitches...Most notably in the speed of the speech and pronunciation...the ghosts seem to skip the middle segment of certain words. It jumps a bit.
Of course, bugs are to be expected with any new thing and once they are ironed out, this could be an extremely impressive technology I think...one which I can see employed in a myriad of different applications. I thought the ability of the ghosts to interpret the wording of a user's requests was particularly impressive. Computer speech recognition and comprehension certainly seems to have come a long way. There is still some ground to be covered, but it's getting there.
Actually that is pretty f*cking annoying.
Whenever we get visitors they can never find their way around. As a consequence, the administration have begun putting signs up that are printed on a printer.
So much for that.
Sorry if I sound like some old weiner, but it _is_ annoying. Staff and students can find their way around, but guest trying to locate someone have to look at a large number of pretty offensive "pyxlings", and it does not really help the faculty, when they want to give the impression of some kind of serious work going on here. I have had people been really put off by it.
Scott McCloud believes that childrens' tendencies to game the system are what inspire new technology and new uses for existing technology.
Couldn't find any reference to this anywhere on his site.
Example: When McCloud's kids use KidPix, they co-opt the dynamite-style erase tool to make intersecting concentric circles.
Circles that are both intersecting and concentric? Wouldn't that make them...let's see...the same circle?!
Then again, I have never used KidPix. Maybe this "dynamite-style erase tool" has some kind of weird mathematical law-defying abilities...