Date:
Location:
CRCS Lunch Seminar
Date: Monday, November 9, 2009
Time: 11:45am – 1:15pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area
Speaker: Yorick Wilks, Oxford Internet Institute
Title: Internet Companions: Technical and Social Issues
Abstract: COMPANIONS is a concept, and the title of an EU project (http://www.companions-project.org) that aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual ‘Companion’. This is intended as an agent or ‘presence’ that stays with the user for long periods of time, developing a relationship and ‘knowing’ its owners preferences and wishes. The Companion communicates with the user primarily through conversational speech. This talk describes the functionality of a Senior Companion (SC), one of two initial prototypes built in the first two years of the project. The Senior Companion provides a multimodal interface for eliciting and retrieving personal information from the elderly user through a conversation about their photographs. The Companion will, through conversation, elicit their life memories, often prompted by discussion of their photographs; the aim being that the Companion should come to know a great deal about its user, their tastes, likes, dislikes, emotional reactions etc, through long periods of conversation.
It is a further assumption that most life information will be stored on the internet (as in the Memories for Life project :http://www.memoriesforlife.org/) and the SC is linked directly to photo inventories in Facebook, to gain initial information about people and relationships, as well as to Wikipedia to enable it to respond about places mentioned in conversations about images. The overall aim of the SC, not yet achieved, is to produce a coherent life narrative for its user from these materials, although its short term goals are also to assist, amuse, entertain and gain the trust of the user. The SC uses Information Extraction to get content from the speech input, rather than conventional parsing, and retains utterance content, extracted internet information and ontologies all in RDF formalism over which it does primitive reasoning about people and places. Even in its current state it raises issues about what kinds of entities people want to emphasize with and trust, once we go beyond humans, and how one can best synthesize personality and emotional rapport. If a Companion were to become the internet repository for someone’s whole life, to be a “cognitive prosthesis” for dealing with their own life’s records, what safeguards are essential, both technical and legal, concerning access to such a repository during the owner’s life and after?
Bio: Yorick Wilks is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield. He received his MA and PhD (1968) from Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has also taught or researched at Stanford, Edinburgh, Geneva, Essex and New Mexico State Universities. His interests are artificial intelligence and the computer processing of language, knowledge and belief, especially as applied to the future of the Internet: the Semantic Web and the possibility of Companion-like interfaces.
His recent books include: Natural language Processing and the Semantic Web (with Christopher Brewster, Now Books, 2009); Machine Translation–how far can it go (Springer, 2009); Artificial Believers (Erlbaum 1991), Electric Words (MIT, 1996) and Machine Conversations (Kluwer, 2001); and a new edited volume in 2009 from John Benjamins is: ‘Artificial Companions in Society: scientific, economic, psychological and philosophical perspectives’. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies.