Dear Singularity and AGI readers, I'd like to give you guys an update on what's happened since our last round of emails, and to ask for some help (more involved this time).
You may remember me from an email thread I started about a year ago entitled,*"Student here, please advise."* link to the archive: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg04433.html At that time, I was asking for advice on which university major to pursue, and what I can do to help further the advancement of AI. I received a surprising amount of helpful suggestions from many members of this community, including *Jan Klauck, Ben Goertzel, Mike Archbold, Matt Mahoney, Sergio Donal, and Anastasios Tsiolakidis.* I wrote this email in part to thank all of you for giving me the guidance and inspiration to follow through with what I dreamed of doing ever since I read the Cosmist Manifesto. Ever since then, I've worked a lot on improving my programming skills. I've learned Java, Python, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Javascript/jQuery, HTML/CSS, and C++. This summer I secured a job as the lead developer at a small start up company - focused on developing a form of narrow AI - with the purpose of helping employers sort and rank resumes. The software we developed reads through resumes and ranks the applicants based on individual criteria such as business, software, and marketing experience. We released the beta version mid August (a few weeks ago), and one corporation has already signed on with us! *Here's where I need your help:* The way our algorithm works is admittedly pathetic ... we feed it a set of hundreds of terms and phrases relevant to a particular criteria, and after some basic word fuzzing, the program searches through the resumes, and awards points based on the occurrence of matching terms. It then adjusts the overall ranking of applicants using "weights" assigned by the recruiter with a slider for each criteria. The whole application is written in Ruby within the Rails framework and hosted on heroku. Here's what part of the UI looks like: [image: Inline image 1] I'm looking for some guidance on how to implement actual AI principles like neural networks to improve the ranking process. I have a lot left to learn as far as programming anything resembling AI goes, and I know there is a wide breadth of information on the topic. *But the reason I'm coming to you guys first before diving into the topic literature on my own is to hopefully get some pointers on what concepts, methods, and/or implementations of AI to focus on.* I would really appreciate any specific advice on how to start implementing the exact type of AI I'm looking for. *What set of concepts and tools in the AI toolkit do you guys think would be most relevant to the problem I'm trying to solve? *Any help will be greatly appreciated. That's all for now... and as for my major, I finally chose to go with Cognitive Science with a focus in computation. I'll be transferring to a UC(University of California) next fall, hopefully it'll be UCLA. Thanks again for the help fellow AGI'ers. I hope we can make a lot of progress toward AGI in the near future and maybe even get close to singularity!! :D Needless to say, I'm super excited to be a part of it all. Regards, Emahn ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
