Archive
A short summary of previous projects I worked on.
Chimpz (2007)
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Chimpz is an ambitious project to build the ultimate personal agent with human-like intelligence and commonsense, helping users find answers on the Web while dishing entertainment. By grafting chatbot technology with commonsense reasoning (leveraging my previous RubyCon work), Chimpz in my view represented a genuine advance in avatar design. At the same time, to avoid users making too high an expectation on the caliber of intelligence that current technology can bear, I deliberately chose an ape-like character to hopefully convey the right impression.
Chimpz ran online for about one year until maintenance issues finally made the project unsustainable. Besides the usual uncertainties of a hosted service (such as periodic system upgrades that break the app), the more serious problem is the need to constantly refine that chat database to provide conversational novelty. This of course is a poor substitute for what is truly needed– a means to remember previous interactions with the user and to direct the conversation based on those previously-learned facts and on the user’s interests. This I think is the Archilles’ heel of any chatbot technology.
RubyCon (2005)
RubyCon is an open-source, rapid development toolkit for building concept processing and other intelligent reasoning systems. It builds upon the work of the ConceptNet 2.0 project (now superceded) at MIT Media Lab, enabling software developers to create apps can can reason about the world using 280,000+ built-in facts in the Ruby programming language.
Mio C320 Hacks
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The Mio C320 is a low-cost portable GPS device that can be turned into a full WinCE device, a music/video player and other hacks, as many sites reveal.My exploits include how the Traffic Message Service (TMS) gets fed into the device and how to circumvent the built-in SiRF GPS module and use a different module. Despite more capable successors, the C320 remains popular in some circles. Its appeal derives from its extreme hackability (word?) with plenty of sites describing how to unlock the WinCE operating system, update maps, play music/videos, etc. These are nice but my interests lie elsewhere. I was curious how the Traffic Message Service (TMS) gets fed into the device and whether it was possible to circumvent the built-in SiRF GPS module and use a different part. After some experimentation, I figured out both.
Future Plans
I have high hopes for the Mio. With some effort, one can make it into a mini-display for a robot (by writing a processor that accepts vector/text commands over the TMS port) or maybe even a Linux-based wearable computer.