Greetings all, Just a reminder that our next group meeting is tomorrow, Tuesday Nov 24 at 2pm in HH 321. The main topics of discussion will be your Eliza programs, which we have exchanged and have been running, so your comments and observations about each other's programs and documentation will be of great interest. In addition we will discuss Alan Turing's famous paper on the Turing Test, so please make sure you have read through that before we meet. (This is available in the Files section of our Yahoo group if you need another copy).
I will also share with you a few observations on my recent trip to the AMIA conference (in San Francisco), where the main topic is medical informatics. And in fact Eliza was mentioned during one of the large plenary sessions, so she remains relevant even after all these years. :) It's actually a simple observation that was made - numerous studies over the last 40 years have shown that humans are far more willing to disclose personal information about themselves to a computer than they are to a fellow human (like a nurse or doctor). The speaker pointed out that this finding goes all the way back to our friend Eliza, and so the overall conclusion was that it is sometimes more effective to solicit certain types of personal information via a computer than it is via a personal interview. Enjoy, Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse
