Chatbot Weirdness!

Chatbots are often used as Web chat support agents to help you solve basic problems. When they are interacting with a person, they seem eery as they converse in an almost lifelike fashion. Researchers with a bit too much free time on their hands wanted to know what would happen if you connected two Chatbots together so they could talk to one another. The results was something even the researchers has not expected. Watch what happens.

Celestia, Impressive Free Planetarium

Celestia is a very impressive, and free, planetarium that "Unlike most planetarium software, ... doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy." Also, unlike other planetarium software, it has a huge repository of optional add-ons that include Science Fiction worlds and vessels from Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, and others.

I've recently been enjoying this software, though I haven't had time to read the manual, which is probably necessary. Still just using it to view the planets in the solar system in real time is interesting enough. Even just using it for its opening view of the Earth as it rotates in real time is worth the download.

It is available free for windows, mac, and linux HERE and its add on repository is HERE.

Virtual Eve: first in human computer interaction

Shaun Saunders sends in this piece from Physorg.com with the comment

Meet the software behind the Infopanels of mallcity 14!!!!!!!!!!

The near-human performance of a virtual teacher called Eve created by Massey researchers has drawn the attention of scientists across the computing world. Eve is what is known in the information sciences as an intelligent or affective tutoring system that can adapt its response to the emotional state of people by interaction through a computer system. he ability of virtual Eve to alter her presentation according to the reaction of the child facing her at the keyboard has been hailed as an exciting development. Although Eve was developed for one-to-one maths teaching with eight-year-olds, she is a significant new character in the future of human computer interaction and could be a personalised virtual tutor by any name.

(of course Shaun would say that it will make intelligent billboard or his "infopanels" that closer to reality. Yep, dead on Shaun!)

New software can identify you from your online habits

Boy if you can't see a science fiction story in this....Shaun Saunders, our resident consumerism critic, sent me this..... and if you haven't already seen indications of this and see the implications....well....

>The computing giant Microsoft, is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing telltale patterns in your web browsing history. Previous studies show there are strong correlations between the sites that people visit and their personal characteristics. So, IF YOU thought you could protect your privacy on the web by lying about your personal details, think again.<

Click the article title for more....oh and there is much much more

The Human Brain....

Jeff Hawkins created the Palm Pilot and the Treo. Now he says he’s got the ultimate invention: software that mimics the human brain.

Jeff Hawkins of Palm Computing and Handspring is at it again. This time he is going where conventional wisdom has cashed in and given up the ghost. Hakins has set up a new company
called Numenta. Numenta's product will be something different for Hawkins - a data set based on how the human mind thinks, and learns. Hawkins has some radically different ways of
expressing how the mind learns and thinks, which puts him ahead of how conventional have addressed the problem of a true human level AI.

click the article title to go to the complete story. Its truly fascinating.

submitted by Shaun Saunders

Emotion-aware teaching software tracks student attention

Shaun A. Saunders (author of MallCity 14) brings this little tidbit to my attention. For those of you that haven't read MallCity, look for the review a few entries back in this blog, MallCity is "BigBrother" in the extreme - where marketing and consumption are not only a way of life, but the only way to live. One chapter of the book deals with the very disturbing idea of how intrusive software and hardware are becoming in todays school environment. Shaun's idea was fiction...here is the fact:

Tutoring software that knows when students' are losing interest in a lesson and can adjust to keep them on track is being tested by researchers in China and the UK.

The system keeps track of students' attention by measuring physical signs of emotion. It then varies the speed and content of a lesson based on an assessment of their level of interest. Ultimately, it could improve electronic tutoring programmes, say the researchers involved, thus helping developing countries deliver education to remote areas that lack educational institutions.

Software To Predict Who's Likely To Be A Murderer

Since the movie Minority Report we've seen a number of technology advances. However, much more interesting was the central tenet of the story, about police being able to predict crimes. Now, we've got a story saying that a researcher at UPenn is developing software for the city of Philadelphia that will try to forecast who is likely to become a murderer out of criminals already in the probation department's computers. Obviously, the idea isn't to lock these people up for a crime they haven't committed but to put extra emphasis on working with those individuals to try to keep them from fulfilling the prediction.