What AI Elements Could Improve the Web? 328
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?
Keep track of sports scores (Score:1)
Well, that's what's selling all these damn web-enabled cell phones I keep hearing advertised.
Re:Web site? (Score:2)
That's a hard AI problem. If you can solve it, I can assure you you'll be famous.
I know of a program that scans images (from the web or other places) and picks out porn. Don't laugh, it's real. The program, I don't remember its name, selects pictures containing nude bodies. It works by recognizing skin tones and, I think, not the absolute color values, but rather certain color gradations.
Face recognition (which is what you are talking about) is being actively worked on now. One of the applications is being able to automatically identify people observed by the ubiquious security videocameras. Would you like to live in an aquarium?
Kaa
Active Feature Enhancement (Score:1)
An agent for each program, and for each developer. A classification system that learns about the kinds of bugs and updates there are, and learns about the abilities of the developers, and bridges the gap between them. That'd be awesome.
It not only searches out developers to fix (or work on) code, it searches out programs that developers could make a big contribution to.
Also, possibly, an agent for each bug reporter... And for each "reviewer" - people who verify bug fixes / enhancements.
The system would learn, over time, for instance, that I like to complain about weird interfaces and constantly demand good help systems. It would then know to use me as a "reviewer" of fixes to those kinds of problems. "Dear VikingCoder, the AFE system has received a fix to a help system problem in emacs, would you be willing to review and grade the fix?"
Also, it learns that I'm a very apt OpenGL coder, and learns that if it asks me to write some code, other people are likely to grade my code highly.
HUH? Not bad, eh? This would be a cool, cool, cool system.
You'd probably be able to pawn it off on SourceForge, for instance...
Good luck with your plans!
Re:Pricing agents (Score:1)
1) I'd like to be able to say "Digital Camera, holding at least 36 1024x768 images, no LCD, weight less than
2) Reliably finding the price of a given item for even ONE site would be non-trivial (for some sites). Finding it for many sites would take AI (until we get smart and start using some standard XML for this kind of thing).
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
Search engines (Score:1)
But of course, AI should be dynamic... perhaps in such a situation you could program the crawler to use click-through data from the parent search engine (with the users' permissions of course) to try and formulate an idea of what people like in a website, thus helping the page rankings.
On the other side of things it would be an interesting AI challenge to try to work out what kind of thing people actually want to find when they search for certain terms, in terms of the content and function of the site.
Of course, this may just be a silly idea, but I suppose it might help
Re:"State of the Art" web-based AI (Score:1)
AliceBot: What is this "thinking"?
The defense rests your honor.
semi-structured data organization for "history" (Score:1)
For example, use semi-structured data parsing techniques (based on content, tags, etc...) to loosely organize the information on the web sites that you visit. Later on, you will be able to search, browse and correlate all this information that have "seen", but not retained.
To me, this would solve several very practical problems: Where did I see X the other day? Isn't X like some Y that I heard about?
In essence, an automated bookmarking utility based on content rather than location.
Re:Pricing agents (Score:1)
One thing I would like to see is something that lets you shop for the best price on more than one item at a time (with both items being from the same website) - if, for example, I wanted prices on a specific digital camera and the accessories to go with it, then I would be able to search for websites selling both, sorted in order of lowest combined price.
Of course, that isn't needed as often as a general price search for one specific item, but it could save a lot of time when it is needed.
the Birmingham AI project (Score:1)
Re:Educational Sites (Score:1)
Better yet, The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Stephenson.
Intelligent semiotics (Score:5)
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.
Re:Only one thing AI's good for really (Score:1)
Let's say a combination of AI, robotics, and asteroid mining makes open-source hardware projects realistic to the point where its just as easy and cheap to create your own fusion-powered sattelite as it is to, say, come up with a Linux distro.
Then, someone comes along, and creates an open source web-controlled nuclear-powered death bot. Only a totally international, mirrored site set up with good encryption so users could be totally anonymous. In other words, a web site that was not subject to any government that could be used to kill someone.
Something like that is still a few years down the road, thankfully.
Re:Educational Sites (Score:1)
the targte of most educational sites.
Cait Sith
Re:"State of the Art" web-based AI (Score:1)
How about something regarding computer learning... (Score:1)
Another thing to think about is doing something similar and tying in forward or backward chaining (don't know how viable it would be though, its been a while since I've looked at AI its all fuzzy logic at this point..)
I know a couple years back, there was also a lot of work being done with putting web interfaces on intelligent agents, NLP engines, knowledge bases, etc. Might be worth looking into that also...
taste matching (Score:1)
Anti-redundancy tools for /. (Score:1)
Technonerds: coming soon on z1nc.org.uk [z1nc.org.uk]
Re: Search Engines (Score:2)
The fact that most search engines are still not performing to the standard we might expect simply indicates the monumental task they face.
Re:hey here's an idea... (Score:1)
Smart URL checking (Score:1)
Something like a plug in.
No AI on the desktop. (Score:4)
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.
Technical support and error messages (Score:1)
Re:hey here's an idea... (Score:1)
Just think "adaptive behavior"
Re:pretty neat idea, really (Score:1)
hopefully the algorithm would evolve to be complex enough to avoid being taken advantage of by first posters. it also increases the possibility that comments get moderated fairly. it also backwards commpatable with the current system and can be slowly phased in, by slowly increasing the percentage of algorithms to people.
Re:Web site? (Score:1)
Re:Shameless Plug (Re:AI on the web?) (Score:1)
Google? What's a Google?
g0o0G13 5UX! L1NX2g0 rUl3z!
George Lee
Slashdot with a personality (Score:1)
I guess this could be used to really make sites like Slashdot personalized. This would go further then simply comment moderation. The site would learn what stories, comments etc that the user reads and thus is intrested in. New stories and comments that match those that the user spent time on earlier would receive a bonus and would be presented to the user prior to those that don't match.
This would go further then simply checking the section the news belons to, it would also check the contents of the story. And regarding posts it could check things like contents and who made the post.
Re:hey here's an idea... (Score:1)
Re:Educational Sites (slightly OT) (Score:2)
It actually works pretty well and has done a good job of getting progressively harder as he improves. I can tell, too, that it does little things like keep drilling him on letter combinations/sounds he has trouble with. Also, when it's doing this and he gets several wrong in a row, it'll drop back to easier stuff (or ones that he knows) so he doesn't get too frustrated at getting like five in a row wrong.
---
Re:Sorry to be inflamatory but... (Score:1)
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land
Re:Oh joy! (Score:1)
Hmmm, (Score:2)
Re:No AI on the desktop. (Score:1)
But what if your desktop KNEW that you downloaded updates from site ABC and put them in dir
Granted, no huge leaps of AI here, just minor adaptive behavior. Notice I didn't say adaptive(changing) interface
A good UI (IM[!]HO) should learn how the user works, remember what they did last time, and make it easier to do it every time in the future.
I agree, it should NOT keep making a user re-learn how to use it, instead, it should be almost transparent.
Did I change your opinion?
Re:hey here's an idea... (Score:1)
spam-bots (Score:2)
Re:Pricing agents (Score:2)
HTML parsing != natural language processing
Unless you're implying that you should be able to enter a random URL, like http://www.joescomputers.com/, and have it discover the price for a 10GB Seagate hard drive, or some specific item, without anyone having told the software the format with which Joe's Computers displays its prices, or even which page they're on, then you're just talking about searching through HTML, tables, etc., which is most certainly not AI.
Adaptive browsing (Score:2)
Still that's admittedly AI-weak. How about the adaptive (dare I say even neural-net-ish), FreeNet project? Could you do some work for them in perhaps detecting "cancerous" nodes?
Re:No AI on the desktop. (Score:2)
There's only one way I could see something like this working:
1) If the AI sees that I'm doing something repetitively, it asks me if I want it to do it for me in the future. But...
2) It must be done in a non-magical way. So, to continue your example, there would have to be a "rule file" somewhere that says "abc.com:/home/me slashdot.org:/home/me/important_stuff etc.," which could be edited using conventional tools. In other words, the AI shouldn't do anything that can't be done manually.
Re:Web site? (Score:2)
It looks to me like they're mostly considering the colours used in the images rather than the shapes and you get very fuzzy matches. Still, it is something in the direction of what you were thinking.
--
Re:Educational Sites (Score:2)
Reviewing, Filtering, Debunking, ... (Score:2)
Consider the ideas of collaborative reviewing and scoring, along with third-party annotations like like what Third Voice [thirdvoice.com] does. Imagine a "moderated" WWW...
---
That's easy! (Score:2)
caching... (Score:2)
this assumes the user is behind a squid cache.
a client would scan the user's browsing history (from ~/.netscape and ~/.mozilla directory) and then query a server to see what else a user would probably download next. then download the predicted web pages (via the squid proxy).
the server would need to keep track of browsing patters in some fashion (that would be the ai part).
alternatively you could use the squid cache itself to do the predictions, but then you're dealing with multiple people's browsing patterns: experimentation might come into play here to see how well that works.
anyway it would be an interesting project in terms of speeding up web access by utilising "downtime" in net connections.
Automated Software Generation (Score:2)
ASG is a relatively uncharted field of Artificial Intelligence, with possibly unprecedented value with respect to Rapid Application Development and Software Verification procedures. It has industrial as well as theoretical value.
Perhaps attending the AAAI conference in July/August in Austin Texas would also be of help in providing some insight to what field would be most suited to your desires.
Cheers!
Brian
Shameless Plug (Re:AI on the web?) (Score:3)
I happen to work at a startup, Links2Go, Inc. [links2go.com], 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
Re:AI on the web? (Score:2)
Ahh, there's a good AI project (though not web related). Make an AI program that can find out how to figure out the highest prime number! Easier said than done right? Heh...
Smart, proactive cache (Score:2)
Most people here want better search engines. Forget that. That's a crowded arena.
I'd like smart web prefetching and advertisement filtering. Basically, I'd like my browser to figure out which links I'm most likely to follow on a page and start prefetching those links. I'd also like it to block content which I'm not interested (but still leave a tag so that I can 'correct' it if it's overzealous).
Essentially, a combination Squid + Junkbuster, only proactive.
--Joe--
Re:AI on the web? (Score:4)
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.
AI on the web? (Score:4)
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.
hey here's an idea... (Score:2)
In the Windows world (forget about stability, I'm talking USABILITY here), we have windows that pop themselves to the foreground whenever the hell they want, and where you click START to SHUT DOWN or LOG OUT.
And in the Linux world, we have a new window that gets created but doesn't get FOCUS, and we have the very UNoriginal Windows95 look and feel, but without scroll-wheel mouse support. And the rarely implemented-properly cut/copy/paste features.
All in all, I have to say, a decent desktop UI with some AI (or even just 'I') features would be just dandy. So forget the web stuff for now, and give us a decent UI !
web-based AI that [unlke alicebot] _works_ : (Score:2)
if you are looking for a web-based Artificial Intelligence which actually solves problems and attempts to in some way synthesize the information given to it based on context, i suggest you look at
http://www.forum2000.org/ [forum2000.org]
I assure you, you will be impressed.
Re:AI on the web? (Score:3)
Actually, I was going to suggest something that is -- well, not quite the opposite, but certain very dissimilar to what most people would expect from this premise.
I have a huge variety of interests, and despite searching the web about a dozen times a day for disparate minutiae, I really don't have too much difficulty finding what I want. Of course, most people find my search strategies incomprehensible.
What I really want, which would require AI, rather than just clever search design, is this: I develop new interests constantly, but it's a hit or miss prospect. Sometimes I find torrents of them, while at other times, nothing new comes down the pike in weeks. I realize that there is a time dependency too -- often an article that didn't interest me last year fascinates me this year, or vice versa.
If an AI could point me at stuff I'd like and don't know about (aside from the limited domain of music, books etc.) I'd be very happy. If it could flash a dozen or two words on the screen to indicate the *themes* it's extrapolating from my current interests, I'd be fascinated.
Often a golf caddy cal tell you things about your game that you never knew. And certainly the legend of the butler is someone who can assist you in myriad ways because he observes things about you that you might not, yourself. [Chesterton]
But spare me from AskJeeves or some gottverdammt prying market-profiling 'personalized portal'
_____________
Pricing agents (Score:2)
-automatic sale ending date detection
-automatic score-lowering for companies the user doesn't like (i.e. give me the lowest price that isn't at WalMart)
-automatic score-lowering for companies with "bad practices" (i.e. give me the lowest price that isn't from a company with slave labor)
-couple those last two with automatic parent company tree-walking (lowest price that isn't from company doing bad stuff AND isn't owned by a company doing bad stuff)
-full generality: I want to price toilet paper AND houses
Any other features?
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
Artistic AI (Score:4)
---
How about a AI poster? (Score:2)
Townshend? (Score:2)
The great spamming search engine (Score:2)
1. Is this site informative about John Tesh? Pick one: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 (High number is yes, low is no)
2. Is this about John Tesh's music?
and so on, it could use an AI routine to come up with appropriate questions based on bios or definitions of the topic. The search engine would be question based, I would type in "Who is John Tesh" and I get the most obvious hits listed but I also get a series of links asking me things like: John Tesh's Music, Why people don't like John Tesh, Photos of John Tesh, etc.
All done by AI and webmaster feedback.
Essentialy you'll get an informed series of specialized topics and their hyperlinks for every search. Sure it would spam the hell out of people, but the better it works the more webmasters will want to fill out the form to get a more accurate listing.
Re:Intelligent semiotics (Score:2)
As a matter of fact, I think that most of AI's practical successes have been entirely GOFAI. Take Cyc [cyc.com], for example. (Incidentally, "Cycorp" has got to be the coolest name for a company that I've ever heard, especially considering that their business is actually as creepy as their name.)
Actually, now that I read your post more closely, I don't think we're disagreeing... With today's technology, most useful AI projects are best implemented using GOFAI, or at least a solid GOFAI foundation. It's just a question of politics, whether you consider GOFAI a kludge or a genuine model for AI.
AI on the web (Score:2)
Finding, for instance, data that is more related to a user's OS when seraching would be a nice feature. The problem is, for anything that demonstrated an appreciable amount of AI, you would have to go beyond simple searches. My recommendation would be to create an automatic moderation system for a weblog. I'd be curious how an AI would moderate a posts involving Natalie Portman and hot grits. :P
--
Only one thing AI's good for really (Score:4)
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.
Re:A couple of suggestions -- Zipf Precis (Score:2)
Quick Algorithm:
1) Rank all words in a selection by frequency of occurrance.
2) Throw all out pronouns, connectors, prepositions and other too-frequent words that are not nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs.
3) You now have the gist of the article, still organized by word frequency.
4) Go back and find the sentences in the article that contain a large number of high-frequency terms. Print them.
5) You will find that you have just effectively summarized the article.
Actually you will find that you have merely listed a bunch of sentences with high-frequency terms. Use your AI skills to determine how to arrange these sentences so that the top ones *do indeed* summarize the article. (Directed graphs? Semantic nets? Internal references?)
AI karma whore (Score:2)
You could use moderation as an evaluation of the quality of the strategies. Keep in mind that early posters have more chacne to be moderated (up or down than late ones).
__
Neural Net network intrusion detection. (Score:2)
Oh joy! (Score:3)
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
Re:Intelligent semiotics (Score:2)
I see two issues here. The first, I think, is whether a connectionist system can be viewed as a symbol processing system, and I would answer yes, with some caveats. Fodor and others support a very strong form of the symbolic systems hypothesis that I don't think is viable any more. There isn't a single internal logic engine, or any sort of unified "language of thought" in the sense that theorem provers implement predicate calculus. Connected networks do many tasks once thought to require symbolic systems of that type, but don't have any prefabricated symbolic machinery.
However, it is possible to view the state of a neural network as a kind of logic engine, but one that isn't per se compatible with the logic engines of other problem solving networks. An analysis of neural networks for OCR is quite revealing in how individual hidden layer neurons can search for particular features. Some aspects of this can be summarised using more traditional kinds of symbol systems, but the networks generally prove to be more robust frameworks for application.
The search for some unified symbol system able to account for different kinds of human behaviours is no longer a very viable research project. Such a project may have value in AI because we can't build massively connected networks that mimic the topology of the brain, and a symbol processing system may well be the best we can do for some kinds of problems at present.
The second problem is what constitutes artificial intelligence. One of my old profs put it well: once you've solved a problem in AI, it doesn't seem that intelligent anymore.
There is some research in AI intended to solve problems that humans solve without making any particular reference to how humans do it, nor do they try to shed light on the nature of human intelligence. I'm not very interested in that kind of research, prefering research that sheds light on human intelligence. I have no ideological qualms about doing those kinds of projects. If you can write a program that works, more power to you, but I have to question what we mean by intelligence when we say such a program is intelligent.
In principle, I suppose a symbol system can be as intelligent as a human, but only if you define intelligence in a way that makes it difficult say if it is equivalent to what humans do. My Ultra 10 is a hell of a lot better than I am at a wide variety of problems, and it certainly is a symbol processing system, rather than a connectionist one. One could define intelligence in a way that makes my Ultra 10 more intelligent than I am, but I don't think much would be accomplished in that way. We will no doubt expand the number of things computers can do well that right now only humans can do, but I'm not sure we will ever build a machine that we can conceed is equal to humans, because we keep defining intelligence in ways that exclude anything that isn't human.
I've been reading a lot of Piaget and Vygotsky recently, and I think there is a lot of merit to their theories of human intelligence arising through interaction with the environment rather than being something necessarily inherent to brain algorithms. Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind, but I've read a lot of the strong symbolic systems literature, and I don't see anything to make me change my mind so far. If this idea about intelligence is true, it makes it almost impossible to build a computer that we would judge as human equivalent, even if it could do the kind of massive parallel processing brains do, unless we put the computer inside a baby and raised it as a person in our constrained three-dimensional world.
I do consider GOFAI a kludge, and perhaps not even the best kludge available anymore. The trend is towards biologically motivated models that consider human intelligence to be embedded in the functioning of bodies and their interaction with the environment. They have had some major successes and I think they will continue to for a while.
Portal Site (Score:2)
I agree (Score:2)
With XML we can provide some semantic clues. We can find websites that claim "Drew Barrymore" as a major topic, or celebrity interviews with Drew Barrymore listed as an interviewee. We can check the website content to find sections with some bearing on Drew, and we can even use fairly simple language models to make good guesses at the kind of content that website has. Then we can pass the data to some more connectionist kind of program (this is where the magic happens
I think that's a viable, useful approach to these kinds of problems. We can't provide full semantic markup with XML, but we can get part way there. Hopefully, it can be close enough that CPU intensive processes like neural networks can go the rest of the way.
Web site? (Score:3)
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
Re:Pricing agents (Score:2)
In other words, I'd prefer a list of "100 best prices in order" or "all prices within 5% of the best", rather than having someone make a list of 'bad companies' for me. I can remember who the companies *I* dislike are.
I *don't* want my constantly computer bugging me with questions about the dishwasher I bought six months ago, and how I rate that seller's services, etc.; and I don't want it filtering my vision if it can't know that I kinda wish I'd bought it somewhere else. I know these things already, I can scan down a list and cross out the undesirables.
On the other hand, since I doubt that users are really going to reconsider most of their default settings. (Gee, hon, since you always overuse lawn pesticides and contaminate the river anyway, you might as well check the 'evil' companies for a better price on that Weed-Away.) this could very likely result in them making suboptimal choices.
...Like never even seeing that gorgeous house from a "motivated seller" -- because it's a 'visiting executive' house owned by RJ Reynolds, United Fruit, or Amalgamated Toxins... oops, forgot to turn off the 'bad guy filter'.
_____________
Forward searching (Score:2)
Nonkosher suggestion: Porn Filter (Score:2)
Keywords and blacklists are too blunt, wouldn't it be a challenge to make a *useful* filter?
I don't mind people looking at naked bodies, but I would very much like to be able to do a "sex AND NOT [porn]" search for example.
(and if it drives the snake oil salesman known as Cyberpatrol at al out of business, I wouldn't mind)
Re:No AI on the desktop. (Score:2)
The only bad option is one you can't turn off
- Michael Cohn
Cache and precache. (Score:2)
You could also do this kind of preloading on a larger scale by monitoring the server loads, and dynamically changing the content that is preloaded on web pages to anticipate user clicks.
Auto-moderation (Score:2)
Consider the way that Google can identify valuable (or at least popular) websites without any such clumsy user input. Is there a way you could identify a valuable slashdot posting by looking at user reading patterns? There's a lot of different kinds of data you have to work with: How many people read the thread, how much time people spend before moving on, numbers of responses, clickthroughs on posted links, and so on... perhaps all weighted by karma?
You could also try and evaluate a posting based on certain heuristics, though I suspect that would rely a lot on obscurity.... e.g. if people knew that a posting with three URLs was always given credit for being informative, you'd see a lot more suck.com style linking.
On the other hand, you might be able to do about as well as a lot of slashdot moderators.
My supervisor has worked on this . . . (Score:2)
Check out the Agents Group [mu.oz.au] for this and other projects.
DOS Attack Filter (Score:2)
I saw a paper [arstechnica.com]pertaining to that the other day if I remember correctly.
this is sort of weird ... (Score:2)
On the other hand, I can think of useful AI tools on the web, namely good search engines. Some of the clever ones try to match ideas rather than just simple text pattern matches. Perhaps you could work with that area, but it's nothing new.
But this still seems really silly. If you can't think of any good new innovative uses of AI to use over the web, then why are you asking us? Why focus on that small area of potential for AI applications for your project? More importantly, what are you going to do with any new ideas that do show up here? Are you going to give credit where it is due, namely to whichever /. reader gives you the thesis idea? And is this really what your profs have in mind when they ask you to come up with a project to prove what YOU can do? Is this going to impress whoever has to judge the value of your project?
You know what to do with the HELLO.
Re:AI on the web? (Score:2)
Of course, there might be something out there already that I just don't know about. Just a thought to provoke discussion.
Re:AI on the web? (Score:2)
Re:AI on the web? (Score:2)
===> when was the sphinx built?
Which movie in The Internet Movie Database do you mean:
Sphinx, The (1933)
Sphinx, The (1916)
I think this AI needs to study a bit more history.
Re:No AI on the desktop. (Score:2)
---
pretty neat idea, really (Score:2)
Or, this could end up being a filter that an individual user could apply to his/her Slashdot viewing, so that moderation reflects his/her tastes, data-wise.
"State of the Art" web-based AI (Score:2)
I've just done mine! (Score:3)
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.
Educational Sites (Score:5)
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?
A couple of suggestions (Score:3)
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.
Re:Machine Learning for Information Retrieval (Score:2)
Re:AI on the web? (Score:5)
Karma agent. (Score:2)
--
Human Resource Relator (Score:2)
Mix
- natural language parsing
- web crawler / discussion group logger
- intelligence
Get
- persons (id by nick/links/style)
- topics a person discusses
- depth and linkedness of topics
Provide
- lists of specialists on a wide range of topics
Probably nothing too new, but the reqs/specs should be adaptable for something useful and implementable.
Re:this is sort of weird ... (Score:2)
Re:How about a AI poster? (Score:2)
If you're going to have such a program for people to chat with, that is called a Cha tterbot [dmoz.org]. It's been done [chatter-bots.com].
There are an assortment of Vi rtual Robots [about.com] for different web tasks. Personally, I think the searching/indexing problem is still lacking a solution -- although librarians have been working on it for decades.
Smart searches using clustering techniques (Score:2)
Re:Web site? (Score:2)
Sam
___________
Re:Educational Sites (Score:2)
Hmm... This sounds familiar. ;-) If you're interested in seeing a kind-of implimentation of this, check out Orson Scott Card's description of the Fantasy Game in Ender's Game. Its kinda fragmentary and self-contradictory in places, but the book was written over a decade ago.
-RickHunter
Re:hey here's an idea... (Score:3)
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.
Sorry to be inflamatory but... (Score:2)
Plus, we don't need to help those who want to write filtering software for other purposes.
I'd rather he worked on a slashdot posting agent! Something that combed the web for potentially interesting Slashdot stories for us to read and comment on.
Re:AI on the web? (Score:2)
artificial == not real
intelligence == smart
therefore, artificial intelligence == not real smart
I remember AI being the big buzzword about seven or eight years ago, but it was set aside after failing to deliver computers that think and whatnot. Intelligent agents have taken the place of AI since then. It would be really cool to see universities supporting an intelligent agent network that would allow users to submit an agent to perform some specialized task.
The idea is for the agent to travel from machine to machine using unique data sets (usually massive data sets that would be unweildly to move around) to perform calculations or gather statistics. Or the agent coule replicate itself as it travels and perform a massively parallel calculation.
Yes, yes, yes, but what about viruses and malevolent users etc. etc. etc. The network admins and managers would have to restrict usage to those would could be trusted. The code would also have a trust level associated with it as well (along the lines of Java and the JVM).- ----------------
-----------------------------------------------
Semantic customer profiler (Score:2)
I've always found it disappointing that systems which try to profile customer preferences aren't smart enough to understand that people can like the same thing for completely different reasons. A smarter system should be able to model the motivations and intentions of consumers to better match them to products and services. It would need to be able to store partial information, which may not make sense initially, but which could provide meaning after sufficient accumulation.
I think consumers would be very willing to answer questions like, "Why did you buy this product" or, "Click the attributes you like/dislike about this product." Most people who browse the internet are often actually looking for in-depth product information. In fact, the ideal way to collect this information would be to interact intelligently with the user when they are using a search engine, trying to find a specific piece of information. It would be great if AI software could help them find what they are looking for and be able to suggest truely similar alternatives.
This may seem nefarious, but I don't think advertising would be an intrusion if it were driven by true interests of individuals rather than the sales goals of marketing execs.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
Re:AI on the web? (Score:2)