Marvin Making Marvin

At the lab, I share an office with two folks working in Push Singh and Marvin Minsky’s Common Sense Computing artificial intelligence research group. The group has recently been looking at finding new corpora of data for helping to teach computers common sense. Recently, someone had the idea of using blogs as a source. My officemate, Dustin, decided to try out Livejournal.

Now LJ has something of a reputation for being a place where angst-ridden and depressed teenagers vent their spleen. From a small random sampling of data, Dustin seems ready to conclude that:

  1. LJ’s reputation is not as fully undeserved as some might hope.
  2. LJ is probably not the best source of data on which to build the future’s artificial intelligences.

These snippets are from the first 5-6 random posts:

Certain people think I suck, but others don’t. Feel free to be the judge.

And I’m going to slaughter the person who gave me whatever it is that I have right now. As soon as I find them. And I’m about to be one of those people who go to work sick because I need money.

My thoughts of late have been pretty scattered and off the wall. But the last few nights have been very rough on me. My dreams, actually nightmares, have been of death, violent death. Death of myself, both body and soul. As a result, I am in the process of making a will. I don’t want to sound morbid but I feel that this is something I have to do. I’m not sure why and maybe I’m just in a wonky mood.

The Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy anyone?