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
• Google AI contest

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 - Interested in analyzing the stream of meaning from humans on the internet -- twitter is especially curious. I am a bit obsessed with text-to-speech integrated into ambient soundscapes. Have flirted with various machine learning and ai algorithms, but always need to refresh. I am also interested in simple game AI and strategy. Also like computer word games and computer-generated theater/poetry. Have used nltk and would like to learn more.

• Al Haraka

• User:Oberoc (Tino Dai)

• Phil Kimmey: Interest in AI, with a primary interest in learning more about non-deterministic approaches and applications, which hopefully will lead to an interest in NLP as well.

Meetings

Next meeting is 2/25 NARG meets on Thursdays at HacDC at 7pm (probably for a couple of hours).

Other events and cancelations will be announced 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 and neural nets. We'll use python since most people are willing to use it and have at least played with it, though Brad personally prefers Steve (spelling?? - some unholy combo of smalltalk and javascript?) (correct this info)
  • 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 it generally convinced everyone there were some exciting potential bridges between the two disciplines.