Chatbots.org Business News

The Chatterbox Challenge (CBC) 2009 is an online bot contest held every year since 2001.  This year was different, every bot showed great skills during the contest and the finalists were even closer at score! Jeeney AI managed to pull the “Best Overall Bot in 2009” title.

A revolutionary interactive 3DTV system is being created by De Montfort University Leicester (DMU), England, researchers. The €4.2 million (approx £3.7 million) project aims to develop a television that can recognise where somebody is sitting in a room and what they wish to view and interact with on their television.

Researchers believe it is a step towards truly interactive 3D video games where gamers use their bodies to control the action without the need for a controller. It could be the next step for Microsoft’s Project Natal.

The project, called HELIUM3D (high efficiency, laser-based, multi-user, multi-modal 3D display) is also exploring ways of allowing viewers who are watching the same television to each view a different channel at the same time and could even let them choose different viewing positions within the image.

For example, groups of people watching a football match in the same room could each pick the part of the stadium from which they would like to experience the action.

Project to develop an Open Source Framework to create bots for Second Life

Chatbot site that encourages you to create a virtual you and create historical and fictional characters and chat with them. Virsona’s vision is to create a platform where people can interact with digital personas called Virsonas that draw upon the memories and life experiences of those with whom they have or want to build relationships. Virsona claims to be a social Chatbot platform.

German researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems have embedded a head-mounted microdisplay into a pair of glasses-allowing the user to access and manipulate data with simple eye movements.

The 19th century Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that ideas inherent in human languages might influence or limit human thought, has spawned a wide range of claims, some little more than urban legend; like the claim that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow (they don’t, Inuit has a half-dozen words for snow, that’s fewer than English, and there’s no evidence they think differently about snow than we do). In the 1960s researchers began to formulate tests of the hypothesis and learned language was more universal than relative, leading them to largely abandon the hypothesis. In recent years, though, advances in cognitive science have made it possible to spot experimental differences that might have been missed before. So is there any real evidence now that language influences thought? A new Edge article by Lera Boroditsky say yes. Boroditsky researches cognitive science and symbolic systems - thought and language. She claims to have found solid evidence in Pormpuraaw, an Aboriginal community in Australia.

Rollo Carpenter and David Burden have braved BCS’s Machine Intelligence competition in the past. Details now in for this year’s competition:

8th British Computer Society Machine Intelligence Competition

Wednesday December 16th 2009 at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, UK, during the annual SGAI conference AI-2009

Closing Date for Entries: October 1st 2009

Microsoft’s Project Natal delivers a new addon to your XBox that allows you to play without controller. The system has a 3D camera that maps the exacts position of your hands, your fingers, your feet, your header, your nose, everything in a 3D map. This allows you to control the game with only your body, in great detail, and no controller needed. Furthermore, it recognises voice and faces and supports complex video chat.

Inbenta announces the launch of “Semantic Site Search”, a new service (SaaS-based) that provides search to any website within the cloud computing. After four years of development (project codename: voldemort), this search service includes Semantic Search capabilities and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Site owners will be able to easy-integrate Semantic Search engine on their site and their content. Other features include customization, XML ,API, and real-time reporting tools.