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IBM's Teri-is-a-Girl-and-Terry-is-a-Boy Patent
theodp writes "The USPTO has granted IBM a patent for utilizing naming conventions to assign gender-based avatars for instant messaging. A user named Teri, IBM explains, would be given a girl avatar, while a user named Terry would be provided with a boy avatar. The three IBM 'inventors' were stymied by users named Pat, who as a result will be assigned a 'generic, genderless human figure image as his or her avatar.' Way to honor that significant-technical-content patent pledge, Big Blue!"
What about odd spellings?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Pat is a girl.
Who-did-what-in-the-what-now?
I'll be given a genderly ambiguous avatar as my real name also can go either way.
!!!SPOILER!!!
MaxwellEdison is not my real name!
I know! I'll name myself AFGNCAAP!
-=Bang Bang=-
who is going to be very irritated when it's assumed she's a boy.
The filing date is February 28, 2008.
The only way a patent gets through that quick is 'Accelerated Examination' (decision in 1 year or less).
Like most companies, IBM is only 'not evil' when it's extremely convenient, or there's some marketing value to be had.
What, do they watch old Saturday Night Live episodes? ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
the name Bambi?
It's commonly thought of, and used, as a girl's name, but in one of its most famous uses (the movie) it's a male name.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
She's in her fifties.
The three IBM 'inventors' were stymied by users named Pat
Obviously some people don't watch SNL.
And what about Francis? Or all the meaningless new-age names you get these days?
If you wanted to be cool you would download census data for the user's age, find the user with geolocation, calculate the frequency of male & female names, then use the most likely choice. Oh, and do it in real time.
Give me a break, no one uses names like "Jill" and "Steve" for their avatars! They use names like xXDeath_StalkerXx and KillMurder_415 and awesome stuff like that. This patent ain't worth a case of Bawls.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Maybe they should ask these guys? May I suggest this as an obvious avatar for Pat?
Just like the Pat from SNL? Gender-neutral ambiguous is right! Another case of life imitating art?
But what about african-american names? They are largely made up. IBM can not possibly keep up with that sort of innovation in naming.
with the first name Tracy. I wonder what they assign him?
This is just trouble waiting to happen. When ever you try to assign gender on anything except the Chromosomes it will fail.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My mom is named Terry.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Maybe I missed something, but the link in this article shows IBM will "sharply reduce business method patent filings and instead stress significant technical content in its patents". If you actually care to read the patent filing a little bit, it actually does seem to have a technical basis (e.g. repetition of letters used to scan for feminine names). Whether that's 'significant' or not, who knows, but it's still not a business method. Stop hurting big blue for no reason :(
What about Kingrames? would they erroneously give me a pharaoh's hat and pimp cane?
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
I have a feeling if they didn't patent it, someone else would have and then trolled for license fees. IBM ain't no saint, but while our patent system is still hopelessly broken, sometimes the only way to ensure freedom is to get the patent application in before the next person does.
Francis is a boy. Frances is a girl. HTH HAND.
Can I have a tail?
Is that too hard to do? Or has someone already patented that?
A lot of prominent organizations on the internet are somehow posting in /., clearing doubts about the stuff they do - either openly, like some, or anonymously, like some others.
i wouldnt even want to think that ibm thinks they are above us. im looking forward to someone explaining the bullshit going on with those patents either openly, or anonymously here.
Read radical news here
My first name is Lyndsy -- its a family name going back generations. I'm a guy.
I'll be damned if I'm wearing a dress on their IM system.
Learn about Photography Basics.
I wonder where that leaves, Leslie Nielson, Tracy Lawrence, Charlie Dore, Alex McKenna, and the like.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I call it worthless.
The three IBM 'inventors' were stymied by users named Pat, who as a result will be assigned a 'generic, genderless human figure image as his or her avatar.'
Congratulations! It's a patent!
This space unintentionally left blank.
When ever you try to assign gender on anything except the Chromosomes it will fail.
Actually it fails pretty spectacularly when you try to determine it based on chromosomes, too. There are XY women with androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), and both XXY and XYY men. In many cases, especially those of AIS, they may go their whole lives without knowing that their chromosomes convey something different than their sex organs.
And using sex organs starts to fail as well when you get into intersexed and transgendered people; someone's sex organs may not match the gender they 'pass' as in social contexts, or that they prefer to be treated as.
It is anything but a black and white issue.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Umm, I can't see this having any practical application. Not only that, but since when was a name a reliable method of gender determination? The TSA can't even get it right when they're looking right at the person -- in real life. And let's not even get started on intersex conditions, cultural differences, etc.
IBM just patented itself a lawsuit, nothing more. Move along.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It's amazing that they analyze the name so hard. I would just throw a database at the problem. It's inconceivable that IBM doesn't have a shitload of demographic databases around, which already have name-sex pairs. Just select sex, count(*) where name='terry' group by sex. If the ratio is overwhelming in one direction, choose that, and if the margin of error is too high (and I'd set that pretty low to avoid pissing off Miss Pat), pick neutral. That would work with any language, too (assuming IBM has a database for that culture).
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Two years later tho, and woohoo, Teri was finally a girl. Cost me $100 to confirm it - damned inflation !
I guess the point is, why bother ? Go generic and let people modify their avatars as they choose. In situations where they guess correctly, people wont care, but it will irritate the life out of those people where they get it wrong - and complaints will flow for a situation that was totally avoidable.
Dont pigeonhole people - its a generally negative experience for them, even if you get it right. They feel like they've been played.
And a patent ? My god, what for!?!? Take a name, compare it to a list. Return boy. If its not there, compare it to another list. Return girl. If its not there, Return gender-bender.
What other whiz-bang algorithmic add-ons can there be.. or is the patent about the way they "source" the names (*cough* troll facebook *cough*) ?
IBM, I dare you find a name where there's no one also by that name of the opposite sex.
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
The example ozamosi posted below would be covered fairly well by this patent: Robins in North America would be classified as female, but Robins from Sweden would be classified as male.
My criticism of the invention's effectiveness is that it's not completely fool-proof, and would inevitably assign the wrong gender for people with the spelling typically adopted by the opposite gender. It might be a worse "faux pas" to address a male as female (or vice versa), than to leave assumptions of their gender out of the picture. Of course this might vary from culture to culture, and I really don't know about that. It might be more effective to just force the user to input their gender, but this would have to be done on every client, which could be problematic.
Of course, I'm not sure whether we should be assisting the enforcement of "societal conventions" based on differences in gender, but that's a different topic from the invention's effectiveness.
By the way, here's the relevant part:
Yeah, what about all those Dion/Dionne pairs? (Male/Female).
However, 70% of names with "sh" in the last syllable and 4 vowels are female. (Laetisha, I'm lookin' at you honey!)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
How is this about "rights"? Especially since the patent claims that the user can override the selection, later?
If you ask me, this belongs in Idle
I have patented a process that assigns an avatar gender to a name with One-Clickâ. The One-Clickâ process trounces the IBM competition with its capacity for user-configurable customisation and laser beams.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
I dare you not to offend the all the genderless of the world with your depictions of the Pats, you insensitive clods!
Wow, this is so clever. It never would have occurred to me that someone with a boy's name might be male, and deserving of a male avatar, while someone with a girl's name might be female and get a female avatar.
This is clearly a breakthrough in technology and IBM fully deserve their patent. It's also a slap in the face to those critics who say USPTO's standards are slipping. Go IBM! Go USPTO!
Why don't they just patent giving blue blankets to baby boys and pink blankets to baby girls while they're at it. This patent really covers a unique process in no way base on general knowledge or common convention around for a very long time! Thanks USPTO!
...or so I hear.
How about you stop giving out patents to these useless companies who are clearly just "investing" in patents in the hopes of making a profit from future lawsuits. This is an abhorrent abuse of the patent system which is intended to protect real inventors with real products. Not some schmo who decided to make a database that correlates name to gender. Way to go breaking new ground there IBM.
one mouth says it supports open source, and freely rewards its code to the community
the other crafts junk patents for software that may never be written, magical ideas, and imaginary property..
is there some kind of intervention for this shit?
Good people go to bed earlier.
What about a boy named Sue?
Have gnu, will travel.
...to just ASK the user during the sign up?
Are you [ ]Male [ ]Female
Would you like to use a avatar that is
[ ] Male
[ ] Female
[ ] Generic Genderless
[ ] Tentacle Monster
[ ] Cowboyneal
Postal Software has been doing this for a long time. Some software called PostalSoft was doing this back in the 1990's.
How in the world could the USPTO even consider this.
What about transgendered people and hermaphrodites? I mean, really how exactly do you classify a hermaphrodite?
Would that software return an appropriate avatar for ssj4chan?
And because I don't know if I want to be modded funny or interesting.
Would it return a brown skinned guy I say Raul? what about Abdul, Cole or Hiro? Do I smell a lawsuit?
But... the future refused to change.
My friends Gail and Carol might have a problem with this method, since both of them are male... Sam and Mel might have problem too, since Sam is short for Samantha and Mel is short for Melonie.
I prefer the solution used in the interactive game "Leather Goddesses of Phobos": at the start of the game, you have a sudden urge to use the restroom. Your gender for the rest of the game depends on which restroom door you choose.
Really, I think arbitrarily guessing people's gender is just going to alienate them when you guess wrong.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I had no idea their system was that accurate...
I don't think it tries to guess your gender, I think it tries to guess the gender of the user you're talking to. So instead of you thinking, "I wonder if this person is male or female?" it suggests: "Kyle is from North America and this is usually a boy's name." Of course, "Kyle" is a bad example because you probably already know that. But if the other user were from a different culture, you might not be familiar with the naming conventions, or you might erroneously assume they coincide with your culture's naming conventions.
I think the idea is that people are going to make these assumptions anyway, so maybe a computer can help them be more accurate. This is why the invention is useful.
I'd like to see bureaucracies and creditors here in the US that could remember that I'm a Mr Robin and not a Ms. I was born during WW II and named after Robin Olds, an ace pilot, so it's not as if I haven't been here a while.
A lovely little clerk once teasingly asked me if I was sure I was male. An offer to have a look at my genitals was declined (dammit!) but she was a good sport.
Now, suppose I guess from the username the opposite gender (e.g. for Alice, I guess that its gender is male), and then for displaying the avatar, I intentionally display a gender that in the code is described as male/female, but in reality (the picture), looks like the opposite, i.e. female/male. Two wrongs make one right, and the effect is the same, but by the letter of the patent, I haven't infringed their patent, right?
Anyone who gets offended by a computer program misinterpreting their gender doesn't have enough sense for me to care about anyways. I say assign EVERYONE asexual jellyfish avatars.
and he is Mi! I support you bro, Hua can totally be a last name.
Why didn't they patent gender assignment by semicolon detection?
It is called "sexing" a name in the direct mail business.
Nothing new here. My brother's company had software on a SCO machine that ran a Pick Operating System variant that sexed names back in the '90s.
They used the program to examine a name and decide if they should put a "Mr." or "Ms." as the salutation in automatic letters. The hard part about this was generating the database.
The only difference here is that ibm software assigns an avatar based on the sex of a name instead of assigning a salutation.
I made such a function for my chat bot, Ultra Hal, about 3 years ago. When you tell it your name it looks up in a database (based on social security name database) how likely it is male or female and comes up with different greetings depending on the data. See http://www.zabaware.com/webhal/index.html
Maybe you've missed one of Sweden's most famous artists over that past 15 years:
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn
Her first name is actually "Robin".
I often have people asking me whether I am M or F, Chris seems to be used for both with the same spelling, as are Sam, Kim, and so om. And then there are the oddities; Marion Morrison (John Wayne's real name), Shirley Crabtree (the British Wrestler "Big Daddy"), and probably more
Wouldn't it just be easier to look at the browser cache to see if the user is male...?
Both my wife and I are named Terry, and yes, she took my last name. The running joke is that I get all the bills, and she gets all the cheques.
How about names that are ambiguous, like "Randy"? Which I understand is a male name in the US, but means "sexually aroused" in UK - should the icon depend on which part of the world you live in? And if so, what should the UK avatar be like?
"Leather Goddesses of Phobos"
That games sounds like it's definitely NSFW. Do the leather goddesses offer... "on-site" services, and what are the rates?
You were thinking it too ;)
what ever happened to good old fashioned radio buttons??
...I'm not even allowed to assume that someone is a male or female by looking at them. Because sometimes I'd be quite wrong, and then I'd "offend" them, and then it'd be a big mess.
This seems like an example of software that would only work for the most basic group of the population, and would just annoy a whole another chunk of it. Even if it did work, why is it needed? Just let the person choose. That way if "Josh" is super-flaming, he can pick the girl avatar if he wants. Also, people who have unisex names are annoyed enough by folks not being sure of their gender across the internet, etc. Why add to that when it's so completely unnecessary?
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Hehe. That sounds dirty.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
I'm sure this one feels legitimized. Finally.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
Maria is female, Mario is male. Can't get easier than that.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Many years ago, I was a bit of a high school prodigy. My SAT scores & grades were very very good. Apparently, based solely on my SAT scores and my first name, which in my region of the country is given to males & females, but is more usually considered to be a woman's name, I received a generous full scholarship offer to a prestigious Ivy Leage women only university. As I am not female, I turned it down. On reflection, looking back, I've been kicking myself over that decision ever since...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Saturday Night Life gets no credit at all, for their androgynous "Pat" ???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_(Saturday_Night_Live)
Tch. Shame on IBM.
'Nuff said.
=cjs
What is wrong with simply having a "male/female" option when creating a profile?
This sounds like an invention that is looking for a problem to solve.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
If you're speaking Chinese, you probably do that. But what I've seen of Chinese name usage in English in American business contexts is that the names often get reversed to more American-style name orders, especially if they're using European individual-names (sorry for the awkward construction - I'm not aware of a useful English term for "first name" other than "first name", though the term "Christian name" is occasionally used) or if they're more-than-first-generation immigrants. That's especially true if you're taking those names and putting them into a database like Microsoft Exchange email system's user database, or also if you're abbreviating names. So my friend K.C. Liu is obviously Liu K-something C-something in Chinese, and in spoken English he's either KC or Dr. Liu. And Fu-Li Betty Wang is Wang Fu-Li in Chinese.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There's more than one Western naming convention. Spanish naming conventions aren't the same as English - for instance, José LÃpez Portillo y Pacheco was usually referred to in English as "President Lopez Portillo", or sometimes "President Lopez", and Vicente Fox Quesada was "President Fox". And then there's the concept of "middle name" being something you only have one of...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My mom's name is Marion, spelled like the Duke and Mayor Barry and Pat Robertson spell their first names.
My father's first name was Clare. Most years he was "CA" at work, my mom called him "Clare", and my older cousins call him "Uncle Gus", because he was called Gus as a kid to differentiate from his father who was also named Clare.
They frequently got mail with the wrong title on it - "Mrs. Clare [Lastname]" could be for either of them, "Ms. Clare [Lastname]" was obviously for him, mail for her was often to "Marian". And of course of you were going to put a title on his mail, the proper title was "Dr.", not that he used it except on formal paperwork (he was a PhD, not an MD, and worked at a technology company where lots of people had PhDs so nobody used the title at work either.)
If you've got a shared database between sender and recipient, then rather than having the recipient's software guess the avatar, or having the sender indicate the gender to use, you could have the sender pick the avatar. So yeah, I agree with your "dumbidea" tag.
And the conventions for avatar choice are very scenario-dependent. You might choose a rather different avatar for work than for gaming, for instance...
Of course, here in San Francisco, not only did which gender the law thinks you are just become more important, but gender is a rather more flexible construct. I don't know if my friend who's XXY is allowed to marry *anybody* now.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I had a friend in college whose name was Rene (female, but IIRC she spelled it like that, not like Renee.) She got married, and at one point they received some paperwork for Mr. Rene Lastname. She tried to deal with it, and they told her that no, they needed to speak to MR Rene Lastname, not Mrs. Rene Lastname. ("Dammit, there *is* no Mr. Rene Lastname, he's Mr. Bruce Lastname"....)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
We had no problems picking gender-neutral names to use for text examples that should be politically correct - we'd add Pat if we needed to. In this case, Terry was male and Lee was female.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Back when I was at Bell Labs, the convention for names to put on technical papers was to use initials and last name. I don't know how long that had been going on, but it was viewed as allowing work to be seen without the filter of gender (plus it was unambiguous about whether to use your nickname vs. formal name, for those of us like me who are only addressed with our formal first name by bureaucrats who are pretending to be familiar but don't actually know us...)
On the other hand, there were fewer applications using avatars in those days, and the default avatar was usually a Peter Weinberger logo-face.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...you insensitive clod!
In French, most nouns that end in ie, ce, ion are feminine. One can presume the others are for males.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The second this gets marketed to the world, IBM will 'sell' content of a back-end that will contain lists and assignments. Migration becomes a concern here. Some middle-eastern names that are perfectly masculine or feminine there can easily be mistaken for their opposite in the USA.
Besides that, I have not read the patent, but couldn't this just be a simple lookup similar to SELECT GenderIconHash FROM Names WHERE Name LIKE UserFirstName? Can they seriously expect to win patent lawsuits against a single line of SQL generated by someone who isn't even a real DBA?!