Greetings all, As many of you know, we have had some fairly strong interest in the Open Mind Project over the last few years. Most directly in the context of sense tagging efforts, but I think some of us have embraced the idea of collecting knowledge from the world in an effort to build bigger and smarter machines (that can talk, of course :)
Well, the whole Open Mind concept really owes it's start to a wonderfully smart and inventive fellow named Push Singh. http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/ Here's an especially good description of Open Mind by Push... http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/Kurzweil.html I met Push last summer at AAAI in Pittsburgh (2005) and was struck at how very friendly and kind he was to me, and he reminded me very much of why I love being a part of the AI community. He was not afraid to talk about the big picture, that is making computers that can think and feel and have common sense and can reason about the world. At AAAI we talked especially about a project called ConceptNet that is a very large semantic network of common sense information. http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/conceptnet/ Push thought there might be a role for some of our techniques that we have developed for WordNet (similarity measurements and word sense disambiguation), and I made a note to contact him after the conference, to follow up on those ideas. I recall telling him that I would do that in fact. Unfortunately, I did not get back in touch yet, and I am sad to report that I have recently learned that Push passed away, very suddenly and tragically. Strangely, while in Mexico recently I had been thinking of getting in touch with him about ConceptNet, hoping that he might still be interested... I did not know Push well at all, but his work clearly had an impact on us here, and I think his willingness to focus on the big picture was something that really excited me last summer, and reminded me not to get too bogged down with part of speech tags and pronomial references. :) Instead, let's talk about meaning and consciousness, and let's be serious about it and make it happen. Sometimes you need to hear someone with the courage to say such things out loud, to get you out of a too narrow track, and Push was certainly one of those people who could do that in a rather thrilling way. Here is a memorial site that has been set up for Push. http://pedia.media.mit.edu/wiki/Push_Singh Please visit this and his home page, and follow some of the links to his many interesting projects. Learn a little bit about someone who I really wish I had known better. I must admit, I had hopes of talking to him more at AAAI this summer (in Boston, his home) and I now regret more than ever my slowness at following up on things, and more than that of course I regret someone so incredibly young and talented leaving us so very soon. Life is indeed short. Live it well. Sadly, Ted Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nlpatumd/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
