Week8 Turing Symposium--Shiwei

On Friday, I went to the Turing symposium and heard the talk from Jon Beaupre. The title is “Some Speculations on the Effects of Machine Language on News Delivery Credibility.” Beaupre first introduced us the concept of avatar, which is a virtual representation of the user. Avatar can be two dimensional in online communities or three dimensional in online gaming. Avatars can also be embodied with artificial intelligence. For instance, many websites provide customers with services from artificial assistant with AI. Avatar also has commercial use animated if we can create a face with recorded voice. People can make virtual stars who never exist, and these virtual stars are just what we think as attractive. Beaupre introduced his audience the talking machine--Evie. It is a virtual artificial intelligence created by Existor. On that website, visitors can type questions or words, and the artificial intelligence will respond accordingly although it takes the AI a while to respond. Next, he talked about speech to text technology, which can translate spoken words into text. Microsoft Word is equipped with such technology, which can reproduce the flow of human sentences from speech. Beaupre also mentioned artificial intelligence in science fictions, such as Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. Cylons are robots, and when they have human appearance and human personality they start to think that they are human and they want to produce human and cylon hybrid.
The idea of artificial intelligence is related to Alan Turing because he was the first to work on this concept. He developed the computing machine in 1935. Turing wanted to developed machine that could learn from experience and solve problems by searching possible solutions. In 1950, he developed Turing test, which could test the computer intelligence, and so far no artificial intelligence could pass that test.

         

Evie--the talking machine.

 

Sources:

Beaupre , Jon. Turing Symposium. 5-25-2012. <http://turing.artscicenter.com/participants.html#jon>

Existor. <http://www.existor.com/>

“Avatar(computing).” 3-16-2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_%28computing%29>

“Humanoid Cylon.” <http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Humanoid_Cylon>

Copeland, John. “What is artificial intelligence?” 5-2000. <http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/reference%20articles/What%20is%20AI.html>

Copeland, John. “Alan Turing and the Origin of AI.” 5-2000. <http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/reference%20articles/what_is_AI/What%20is%20AI03.html>