AGS TechBlog
A source and journal of ideas

This morning we signed up as a sponsor for the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling 2009 in Manchester, UK.

The conference is an outstanding global forum on the computational modeling of human cognition. You can find additional information at the ICCM 2009 web site.

I hope to see you there!

-Stu

Interesting article the other day at PhysOrg concerning artificial intelligence research and playing poker at the University of Alberta.

I wrote a post on it in the AI Forum. Rather than repeating the whole thing here, I’ll just point you to the post over there: http://agsforum.agstechnet.com/index.php?topic=22.0

-Stu

We were fortunate to have AFRL research scientist, Dr. Kevin Gluck, visit our new location last Thursday. During the meeting, we discussed our current project: math modeling of human performance in complex environments. Following our weekly teleconference with the research team and demonstrations of the Predictive Performance Optimizer software tool, we enjoyed some informal discussions over dinner.

Dr. Gluck’s visit was an excellent kickoff for our new location!

-Stu

As we continue to build our application development capability and processes, we are very happy that we have been accepted as a NetBeans’ Community Partner. You can find out more about the NetBeans Community Partner program at: http://www.netbeans.org/community/partners/list-community.html

The MindModeling@Home site ( http://mindmodeling.org ) is up and running.  At AGS TechNet, we are volunteering some of our computer time to assist them in their goals. 

Volunteer computing is a way to use your computer’s “idle” time to contribute some number crunching power to assist in computationally intensive research work.

If you are interested, it is fairly simple to get set up and all the steps are explained on MindModeling’s site.  Essentially, you just download and install an application called “BOINC” from UC Berkeley’s site. It allows you to set how much and under what conditions your own computer will get and execute jobs for the research effort.  Next, using BOINC you join the volunteer computing effort(s) that you want to support.  Then, when you are not using your computer, it will download jobs, execute them, and upload the results.  There are many Universities, researchers, companies, and other interested folks that have been participating since 1995 in volunteer computing efforts.  Today, there are over a million BOINC users and the scale of the overall computing effort puts the volunteer computing community easily in the league of the most powerful supercomputers.

If you haven’t heard of it before, you might check it out. Very cool!

-Stu

As I mentioned in some earlier posts, I have yet to find a good site that reviews, rates, lists pros and cons, and similar things for the many artificial intelligence tools, approaches and systems you can find on the web.

Today, we are kicking off our new forum that will hopefully scratch this itch. The new forum can be found at http://agsforum.agstechnet.com

The reviews I intend to do on the forum are not meant as a criticism to anybody’s work, but I feel that many people will be able to use the information to more quickly find the right tools to help them with whatever application they are pursuing.

Its brand new, so there is no meat there yet. I will be writing about systems I know about as much as time permits. Please chip in if you are so inclined.

Enjoy!

-Stu

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Texas, Arlington have released a variety of briefings, reports, and results concerning the automated combinatorial testing for software.   Many of the major news feeds were carrying the stories yesterday.

After reviewing their reports and findings, it sounds like good news for automated testing systems.

There never has been enough time or money to do all the testing that could or should be done for any non-trivial project.  But these results at least provide some support to the idea that a substantial majority of software defects can be effectively captured by automated testing with something less than full-exhaustive testing.  See the following link for the full article, the reports and the results: http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/acts/index.html

It is normal in the software industry to adopt approaches to testing that cover the most commonly used features and cases.  In my experience, you normally get the most bang for the buck by focusing on expected use cases. 

Still, these results were encouraging enough to motivate me to look into the new tool to be released to see how I like it.  I sent Rick Kuhn a note today to get some info.  I will post the results of my assessment of the tool when I am finished.

-Stu

While at the AAAI Fall Symposium this week, it occurred to me that there may not be a really good, reasonably complete, business oriented open source site for tools that businesses, especially small businesses, can use in natural language processing applications.

To be useful to small businesses, the tools would need to be well written, well documented, and constructed in a way that enabled straightforward interface connections between the various parts.  I started making a list of possible component tools that might be included in such a list.  The list is a draft list of course, but hopefully some of you readers out there will help out and give me some additional, maybe even better ideas.

Draft List of Possible NLP Components in an Open Source Portal for Business

• Parser
• Grammar - context free or context sensitive
• Grammar editing tool
• Training text corpus
• Front end user interface
• Synonym dictionary and editor
• Ontology and editor
• Tutorials and documentation for integrating into applications

So far, I have looked around at several sites including NLUC, OpenNLP, and several wikis and university sites.  Several offer some very useful material, but none seemed to offer the “one stop shop” that I had in mind.

If you have some ideas, please leave a comment or send me a note.  If I can’t find something within a few weeks, then I will start ginning one up.

-Stu