Until
next week, 
Intelligent Machine Post
and Ellis's Endangered
Employment Katalog
(IMP/EEEK)
Dateline: April 19, 1998
IN CASE you hadn't noticed, this Miningco Web site is about the possible takeover by intelligent machines of everything, from filtering your mail to writing novels and composing works of music. You'd think people would find this at least interesting, if not downright mind-boggling. But judging by the lack of activity in the AIBB (Bulletin Board), where you can post your comments and opinions about the matter, apparently it is not.
Wired columnist Jon Katz has come by a diferent route to the same conclusion. Pondering the fate of "Unabomber" Theodore Kaczynski and his manifesto that the world is being destroyed by technology, Katz notes that regardless of the murder spree, Kaczynski had a point. "Despite his isolation, in some ways Kaczynski had his finger on the public pulse: there is enormous unease about technology . . . But Kaczynski was wrong if he thought we wanted to talk about it."
Sigh.
Political Campaigns
We're getting so good at predicting stuff, through neural nets and other AI techniques able to cope with complexity and uncertainty, that perhaps one day we won't need elections. The will of the people will always be known. On April 16, 1998, the Federal Election Commission authorized White Oak Technologies, Inc.to market its package of data mining software and services to political campaigns and committees. Employing "advanced Artificial Intelligence techniques," WOTI's CampaignMiner system analyzes databases to identify hidden patterns of collaboration among people or organizations.
Applied to their own contributor databases, the system helps campaigns and committees enhance fundraising yields by identifying previously unknown individuals or groups of givers that influence others' political contributions. Applied to the national FEC contributor database, CampaignMiner helps campaigns find otherwise undiscoverable patterns of regulatory violations in contributions to opposition campaigns.
EEEK! Political campaign staffers.
Mining the Web
AI-driven data mining techniques are certainly hot items in industry today. One of the bigger players, ISL, is working on new "middleware" to provide scalable data mining of the Web, on the Web.
EEEK! Miningco Guides!
Grading by Machine
The Intelligent Essay Assessor software, in development for 10 years and gearing up for launch, "has perfect consistency in grading, an attribute that human graders almost never have," according to one of its developers. The program apparently does more than just count words or analyze mechanics and grammar, like earlier essay scorers. Rather, it determines mathematically how well students understand the material they are taught.
"It's useful for all subjects," said one of its developers, but is "most appropriate when testing knowledge content rather than elegance of writing. It assesses whether the student understands what's in the textbook."
It is alleged to "understand" through "a new type of artificial intelligence," which "In a sense, . . . tries to mimic the function of the human brain." First, the program is fed information through online textbooks or other sources. It determines mathematically what words should appear, but is flexible enough to accept words with similar meanings, such as "physician" and "doctor." Then the professor grades enough essays to provide a good statistical sample, and feeds those results to the computer.
I dunno about the "new type of AI." Sounds like a fairly standard application of a neural net to me.
EEEK! Test/examination
graders.
Intelligent Packaging
I've no idea what this means, but it seems that PCC's Professional Advanced Packaging System has a Rip once multiple plot capability which allows the user to send the file to a wide variety of proofing and film devices. The artificial intelligence built into the software can automatically choose to trap automatically, or alternatively, it can be switched to manual for special trapping requirements.
EEEK! Whoever does "trapping" in the packaging industry.
3-D Graphing
I suspect that not too many owners of PCs with Pentium II chips realize just how much power is at their fingertips. With eight million transistors, the chip is almost last year's mainframe on your desktop. One of the things that mainframes do so well is not just crunching numbers but enabling us to view the results in 3-D graphical format, which is much easier to understand than ream upon ream of numerical tables.
Portola Dimensional Systems is developing an intuitive, powerful interface combining expert systems with advanced 2D and 3D graphics technology in a visualization tool that lets Pentium II users import data from mainstream business applications, spreadsheets, databases and other sources. The data is then displayed in a rich, graphical form that can be manipulated by the user in real time. These interactions allow the user to identify underlying information such as patterns, trends, cause-and-effect relationships, discontinuities, relevance and scale, without needing a background in or knowledge of statistical analysis.
The software is set for release in mid-1998.
EEEK! Mainframes, but we already knew that.
People's Liberation Army Liberated
The New China News Agency says China is gearing up to fight future regional battles using high tech a la Gulf War. You will recall that AI and associated technologies played a huge role in that war, with the human soldiers (on the allied side, that is) by and large acting as little more than spectators or at best machine minders.
Last time I looked, the PLA had about two million (mainly) men under arms.
EEEK! Two million PLA soldiers.
Rockwell + Brightware
Rockwell Electronic Commerce, a provider of mission critical call center systems, has formed an alliance with Brightware, Inc., which makes automated customer interaction software for the Internet. Brightware software will be integrated with Rockwell's Windows NT-based Call Center Command Server (3CS) platform.
Brightware software automatically answers free-form, natural language questions that customers enter on a Web page or send via e-mail. It interprets each inquiry and takes action according to a company's business policies and best practices. Brightware generates immediate, informative, and personalized answers. It also makes proactive, appropriate suggestions and offers, notifies relevant company employees of important situations or opportunities, and acts on requests or routes them for follow-up.
Rockwell's 3CS platform allows seamless delivery of e-mail or telephone calls to an agent desktop using object-oriented technology. The 3CS platform provides a media-independent means of integrating disparate "call types" into a call center. E-mail can be treated with the same sense of urgency as telephone calls. A Rockwell spokesperson said that "the integration of Brightware with 3CS will allow repetitive questions to be answered quickly and without human intervention, and when a personal reply is needed, trained agents are quickly brought into the picture."
EEEK! Call center agents and operators.
Another Kind of Imp
Extempo Systems, Inc.'s "Imp Character" Web Guides, currently in alpha testing, are interactive characters that bring Eliza-like chat, with animated cartoon figures, to Web applications. They can guide a visitor on a tour of a sequence of Web pages. They can elicit information from the visitor and remember and use it to provide a personalized, customized experience, as well as logging it for other applications. Their distinctive personas can enhance brand or Web site identity. They can provide application-appropriate entertainment content to create a more engaging user experience. They can, in short, act as greeters, tour guides, and sales agents.
Their conversation and other behavior follow social and interpersonal conventions attempt to foster a sense of familiarity and relationship for visitors. Web Guides are intended for use in Web E-commerce applications, such as product and brand marketing, sales, and support. However, they can be integrated into any Internet or intranet Web application to enhance content delivery and create a memorable, personalized experience for users.
Web Guides can be custom characters, tailored to a single customer's unique requirements, or stock characters, supplied with a non-technical content authoring tool usable by any Web content developer. You can get a foretaste of Web Guides by checking out "Max" on the Extempo Web site. "Max" will take you on a tour that features pages devoted to other Extempo Imp Characters.
EEEK! Web greeters, tour guides, and sales agents.
More of the same next week!
Until
next week,
NEXT WEEK: More IMP and EEEK.
Help Wanted: Got questions or comments on this article or on any other AI-related subject under the sun? Post it in the AIBB!