MIT Media Lab Course - Fall 2005 Common Sense Reasoning for Interactive ApplicationsMAS 969(H) 0-9-0
Henry Lieberman, with
Push Singh and Hugo
Liu
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Things fall down, not up. Weddings have a bride and a groom (sometimes). If people yell at you, they're probably angry. One of the reasons that computers seem dumber than humans is that they don't have common sense -- a myriad of simple facts about everyday life and the ability to make use of that knowledge easily when appropriate.
A long-standing dream of artificial intelligence has been to put that kind of knowledge into computers, but it has proven slow and difficult. But considerable progress has been made over the last few years. There are now large knowledge bases of common sense knowledge and better ways of using it then we have had before. We may have gotten too used to putting common sense in that category of "impossible" problems and overlooked opportunities to actually put this kind of knowledge to work. We need to explore new interface designs that don't require complete solutions to the common sense problem, but can make good use of partial knowledge and human-computer collaboration.
As the complexity of computer applications grows, it may be that the only way to make applications more helpful and avoid stupid mistakes and annoying interruptions is to make use of common sense knowledge. Cell phones should know enough not to ring during the concert. Calendars should warn you if you try to schedule a meeting at 2 AM or plan to take a vegetarian to a steak house. Cameras should realize that if you took a group of pictures within a span of two hours, they are probably all of the same event.
This course will explore the state of the art in common sense knowledge, and class projects will design and build interfaces that can exploit this knowledge to make more usable and helpful interfaces.
This year's theme will be about trying to use Commonsense knowledge to represent, recognize and reason with such presumably intangible qualities as affect, personality, point of view, and cultural perspective.
Course News:
The warm-up programming mini-project is now posted:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/courses/mas969-fall05/affective-sensor-assignment.pdf
Your assignment is to 1) use open mind common sense to program a textual sensor
to detect affect (or political bias, politeness, humor, or something else of
your choosing) and 2) incorporate your sensor into an interactive application
of your design.
Part One will be due in two weeks (4 October) and Part Two will be due in class
in three weeks, on 11 October (and be prepared to give a quick demo then). We
will email out office hours later this week.
The first meeting will be Tuesday 13 September. Please show up at the first meeting if you have an interest in taking the course.
The class is limited to 25 students; permission of instructor required if demand exceeds that.
Listeners will be allowed only if you agree to fully participate (do all the readings and the final project). No spectators. Please contact Henry Lieberman if your status is not a regular MIT undergraduate or graduate student.
Course requirements
Readings
We will require reading and writing short critiques of two or three papers per week. One paper will be assigned in class for everyone to read. Each week we will have a list of readings and you may choose one or two readings from the list (or one of your own choosing that is relevant to the week's theme). You should write a one-page review of the reading and post it on the course Wiki. You may also react to others' postings, as in any Wiki.
Project
There will be a final project, inlcuding a computer implementation of a user interface using Commonsense knowledge, and a paper describing your implementation. You may work either alone, or in groups of up to three people. You may use any computer system and programming language you wish. A one-page project proposal will be required before the project starts. The paper should be in the style of a short paper for CHI or other academic conference. One or more members of each group will give a 15-20 min presentation of the project, again, in the style of a short conference paper.