MIT Media Lab Course - Fall 2002
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Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 00:16:01 -0500
To: commonsense-course@media.mit.edu
From: Henry Lieberman <lieber@media.mit.edu>
Subject: Great projects, guys!
X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-milter (http://amavis.org/)
Students,
Congratulations to all of you on your final projects presented
today and last week.
I was really pleased with all the presentations. They were all
very clear and professionally done,
and the demos were fun and provocative. I think you all demonstrated
creativity
and hard work in breaking new ground in this ambitious and largely
unexplored area.
If any of you would like to watch the videos to see presentations
you might have missed
or to give yourself feedback on your presentation style (always
a good idea!), let me know.
A reminder, to finish up the course requirements, please submit
to Hugo and I, if you
haven't already,
* Your project paper (following CHI paper format).
* Your slides from the presentation
* (Optionally) Movie (Quicktime, Shockwave, etc.) of your demonstration
* Code, data, etc. that you are willing to share with us.
We will post the above on the course site, which will remain
up (unless you deny us permission
to post your stuff, of course). I think having the site will be
a great record of our
accomplishments and an inspiration and resource for others. It
will also be in keeping with the
spirit of MIT's Open Courseware.
I just want to reiterate my invitation to continue working
with any of you, past
the official end of the course, in developing your ideas, perhaps
for conference papers or thesis projects
or even just for your own interest.
Some of the conferences you might consider are:
CHI (Computers & Human Interaction) Short Papers, deadline
3 January 2003.
http://sigchi.org/chi2003/short_talks.html
Context 03, deadline 27 January 2003.
http://context.umcs.maine.edu/CONTEXT-03/
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI),
deadline 14 January 2003.
http://www.ijcai-03.org/1024/index.html
Please see me if you are interested in submitting to any of
these. Let us know if you find any others
that might be appropriate
Finally, if you have any feedback on the course, what you liked
or didn't like, suggestions for
improvement, etc. I would be happy to hear them. Also, you will
no doubt be receiving a course evaluation
form on which you can provide anonymous feedback.
I'd like to extend my personal thanks to all of you for participating
in the course.
Even though I'm supposed to be a teacher, I'm also as much a student
as any of you and I feel like I
learned a lot from interacting with all of you. Thanks also particularly
to Hugo and to Push for
their assistance with the course.
Cheers,
Henry Lieberman
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 23:09:32 -0500
To: commonsense-course@media.mit.edu
From: Henry Lieberman <lieber@media.mit.edu>
Subject: Reading: Lenat, Dimensions of Context Space
Students,
You should read Doug Lenat's paper, The Dimensions of Context
Space. It was referenced in
last week's discussion and I think is relevant to some of your
projects that involve the contextualization of common sense knowledge.
http://www.cyc.com/context-space.doc
Henry
Students,
I'd like you to read the paper on Whirl by William Cohen
http://www.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Teaching/Common-Sense-Course/Whirl.ps
This paper will take some reading between the lines. While maybe not so directly about Common Sense, I think the idea of interleaving retrieval and inference the way he is talking about, may point to a way out of the common sense reasoning dilemma.
On Thursday's class, our guest will be Deb Roy, and he will present his view on the "Cheap apartments" example and the importance of grounding in determining meaning. Please read the discussion on the board so you're up to speed when we start.
Henry
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 21:05:21 -0400
To: commonsense-course@media.mit.edu, alockerd@media.mit.edu,
selker@media.mit.edu
From: Henry Lieberman <lieber@media.mit.edu>
Subject: The Sims as a research tool
For those of you who think you might want to do a research
project
using the Sims as a test environment, please see
http://www.cs.nwu.edu/academics/courses/c95-gd/index.html
under the heading The Sims Resources. You will find a manual
Programming the Sims by Ken Forbus and Will Wright. We don't
have the software
yet, but check it out and let me know if you think this will be
useful
to you and how.
Ken Forbus at Northwestern used this for a game design course.
He was, however, a bit pessimistic, about its value for us --
it wasn't that easy to use, and lacks features for reading
the game state -- you'd have to scrape the screen. See me for
more info.
Henry
Subject: RE: Sims
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 09:30:24 -0500
Thread-Topic: Sims
From: "Ken Forbus" <forbus@cs.northwestern.edu>
To: "Henry Lieberman" <lieber@media.mit.edu>
Glad to help. A few more concrete notes, to save you and your
students
some time:
The only documentation on Edith is something Will and I wrote, at
http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/papers/Files/Programming_Objects_in_The_
Sims.pdf
I can send you Edith, of course, with Will's blessing. Just
don't pass
it around further. Asking them to add hooks so that external
programs
could access it is probably pretty pointless, since they are heavily
absorbed with The Sims Online right now, with even Sims 2.0 being
pushed
back. They just did the first external beta for TSO; it's kind
of fun
even in the rough, but it's clear they have a lot of tuning ahead.
On the other hand, other folks have had great success with Unreal
Tournament in doing this kind of stuff. For instance, check out
http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/aigames.org/papers2002/MCavazza02.pdf
Which describes an interactive soap opera! You might find
the
compendium of the four AAAI Spring symposia on AI and interactive
entertainment, which this is from, useful more generally for exploring
connections between the gaming world and AI research:
http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/aigames.org/index.html
I do think that gaming environments are a really good vehicle
for this
sort of work. The Flexbot web site is down, but you can find
most of
the publications on Aaron's flexbot page:
http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~khoo/flexbot.htm
Great demonstration as to how a team of undergrads can build
a great
experimental environment for experimenting with robotics and language
ideas out of a game engine.
Hope this helps.
Ken
9 October 2002
1. This week and for the rest of the term we will be meeting
in the Media Lab's
conference room E15-335. We will NOT meet Thursday 17 October
because of
Media Lab Hell Week (our affectionate term for our semi-annual
sponsor symposia).
2. We moved the bulletin board to a faster machine, so it should
be easier now
to participate. (Thanks, Hugo.) Let us know if there are still
problems. I hope this will increase participation!
3. Especially for those of you who will be doing Web applications,
you might
want to investigate the Water language I spoke about in class.
The web site is:
where you can download the interpreter, development environment,
tutorial and book.
Also, there will be a talk on Friday at 2 at the AI Lab by Water
designers Chris Fry and
Mike Plusch, announcement below. We have a Water interface to
Open Mind.
4. Push has a new page with reference to Open Mind applications,
http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/OMCS-Research.html
5. Tim Chklovski has a very interesting project on a learning
module for Open Mind.
It does simple analogy inferences and asks the user to confirm/deny
them. Check it out
(1001 Questions) at
There is also a module that asks the user for feedback for disambiguating word senses.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~timc/
Perhaps we will get Tim to speak at a future class.
This reading is the original paper by John McCarthy about Common
Sense.
It is short, mainly of historical interest, but it lays out his
logical approach.
What do you think?
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcc59/mcc59.html
Leora Morgenstern's Common Sense Problem Page. These are mostly
abstract reasoning problems, but take a look and it may spark
a project idea.
Remember, our goal is not just to solve a logical problem, but
to make some system
that will actually use common sense to be helpful to a user of
an interactive application.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/leora/cs/
A conference on logical formalizations of Common Sense Knowledge
at NYU in 2001.
This represents the state of the art in this approach to Common
Sense.
As I said in class, this approach is about using logical reasoning
to describe common
sense domains, not about doing inference from common sense knowledge.
http://www.cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/commonsense01/
Here's a link to Katie and David's Open Mind Text Editor programming assignment (avi movie).
Please come prepared this week to present your project proposal.
See you Thursday!
- Henry
This week's readings are:
Henry Lieberman and Hugo Liu, Adaptive
Linking between Text and Photos Using Common Sense Reasoning,
Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia, 2002.
Erik T. Mueller, A Calendar
with Common Sense, Intelligent User Interfaces Conference,
2000
Programming assignment: Putting Common Sense knowledge into a Text Editor.
We are trying to get a larger room for the class so that people will be more comfortable. Stay tuned.
12 September 2002
This weeks readings are:
CYC: A Large-Scale Investment in Knowledge Infrastructure, Douglas B. Lenat, Communications of the ACM (pdf).
Thought Treasure : A Natural Language / Common Sense Platform, by Erik Mueller
Welcome, everybody! We had a great turnout for the first session.
If you are interested in taking the course, but did not attend the first session, please send mail to hugo@media.mit.edu and attend the next session.
The course mailing list is commonsense-course@media.mit.edu. You are automatically signed up if you signed the list at the first session. Let us know if you drop the course and wish to be removed from the list.
This week's readings are
Marvin Minsky, Commonsense Based Interfaces, Communications of the ACM (pdf)
Push Singh, et, al., Open Mind Common Sense: Knowledge Acquisition from the General Public, AAAI-2002 (pdf).
This week's assignment is:
Interview someone about what they did yesterday.
For each sentence they say, write down a set of facts (in the style of Open Mind or CYC) that represent the common sense knowledge you need to understand their activities.
After I got up, I had some coffee and toast for breakfast. The first meal of the day is called breakfast.
You eat breakfast in the morning.
Many people drink coffee for breakfast.
I took the subway to work. There were some great musicians in the station. The subway is an underground train.
Street musicians often play in subway stations and ask for donations.
Also, you may be interested in Push Singh's Common Sense Reading Group , at 4 pm on Thursdays in the Media Lab's Garden Conference Room. This is a follow-on to last year's reading group, and will be exploring more advanced and detailed topics.
- Henry