NARG

Welcome to the HacDC Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence Group (NARG)

Overview

The mission of NARG is to bring HacDC community members that are interested in NLP and AI together for research, projects, and knowledge sharing. Supporting members in getting projects done is the primary goal. Contact User:Obscurite for more info.

Reference and Resources

Add links to AI/NLP reference material, courseware, etc.

• Stanford NLP course

• Natural Language Processing with Python

• Spiderland / Breve docs

Members

Some profiles of our members and what they're into:

• User:Obscurite (Daniel Packer) - Interested in emotional interfaces, responsive human interfaces, brain and bio signals, intelligent metadata, and cyborg tech.

• Philip Stewart - Primarily interested in figurative language comprehension, semantics, and digital poetics. Secondarily, event-related potential (ERP) studies, consciousness, and applying scientific findings to philosophical "problematics" in novel ways. Coursework in psycholinguistics, physiological psychology, pharmacology, and functional neuroanatomy.

• Bradford Barr

• Darius Roberts - Interested in health, but if there was a way to make a white-label vark.com that would be my first choice of projects.

• Todd Fine

• Al Haraka

• User:Oberoc (Tino Dai)

• Phil (last name unknown at time of entry)

Meetings

NARG get-togethers are planned via the mailing list. Check it out!

NARG mailman page

Meeting minutes for Feb 20 2010

The first NARG meeting was held on Feb 20, 2010 at Sticky Fingers Bakery. In attendance were Brad, Darius, Phil (not Stewart - a HacDC newcomer), and Daniel. The conversation was relatively free form but a few suggestions were favored:

• Meetings will be ongoing at HacDC on Thursday evenings at 7pm, realizing that due to the high frequency of meetings, some folks will miss some meetings.
• Brad will put together a demo/tutorial using the spiderland.org breve environment on Brattenberg Vehicles as an entry point into AI learning. We will collectively try to use this environment (virtual 3d world with actuators and sensors for 3d movement and input) and graduate to Subsumption Architectures. We'll use python since most people are willing to use it and have at least played with it, though Brad personally prefers Steve
  • http://spiderland.org
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicles
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture
• Daniel will put together a demo/tutorial based on NLTK and the book "Natural Language Processing with Python", which he has a copy of for reference.
• We will eventually choose a robotics platform for physical AI, either a repurposed roomba type solution (favored by Phil) or an open avr/arduino/ucontroller based bot like: http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2009/04/20/arduino-powered-braitenberg-vehicle-light-seeking-robot/

Other topics:

• Brad, Todd, Darius and Daniel have downloaded the google AI tron code - Brad and Todd have working custom code and we will keep an eye out for good show and tell opportunities. Brad's solution is a neural net based one.
• Daniel brought up the idea of machine readable codification of human ideas/statements and the political ramifications after Phil mentioned .gov open data and how it's not well formatted for real time use. Brad mentioned the language http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban - which attempts to remove ambiguity.
• Daniel is interested in using AI for bio signals interpretation and NLP for emotionally contextual interfaces/digital ghosts. Darius is interested in using NLP for matching content with expertise, like http://vark.com which got acquired by google a week or so ago. Brad is interested in AI as a practitioner (it's his job) and wants to do some virtual 3d simulations. Phil is open to pretty much anything (he's too young to know better).
• Brad suggested there were ways to bridge AI and NLP. The idea of bridging NLP and AI via the use of agent based AI that use NLP based communication models in evolutionary scenarios was brought up by Daniel and generally convinced everyoe there were some exciting bridges between the two disciplines.