Report on UIAH Media Lab's doctoral seminar

Natural language interaction

Timo informed that the project on natural language interaction (http://www.mlab.uiah.fi/vuorovaikutus/) has a reasonably good chance to become funded in Tekes' USIX programme. A full-time research position will be available for a person having expertise in the area of natural language processing but also part-time works related to interaction design of such systems would also be available. For instance, Antti would prepare a report from the point of view of the Deaf.

Next NIMRES

Next Nordic Multimedia Research School will be held in Gothenburg (Göteborg) on June 2-9 with the theme "Real and Virtual Communities". Themes incluce "communities in urban context", "virtual communities", "communities of virtual agents" and "simulations and virtual environments for children".

In-depth questions: relevance, rationality

A long conversation was going through many kinds of in depth questions related to the initial topics of (natural language) interaction and relevance. Jukka pointed out the Socratic method and the question if this could be used in natural language processing. (See, for instance: http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~phildept/Dye/method.html)

Timo pointed out that conducting good conversation requires substancial amount of background knowledge. This has also been pointed out by by Joseph Beck, Mia Stern and Erik Haugsjaa in their article on "Applications of AI in Education":

"Another obstacle in representing multiple teaching strategies is the limitations imposed by other components of the ITS [intelligent tutoring systems] in addition to those placed by the student model. In particular, the difficulty of representing knowledge impedes the ability to explicitly represent teaching strategies. For example, the Socratic method requires substantial ``common sense'' knowledge beyond what is maintained in a domain knowledge base. This problem of scaling up the knowledge base is not unique to ITSs and is common to many areas of AI." (http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds3-1/aied.html)

We discussed about issues related to the world views. Lily pointed out some problems related to the concept of rationality. Jukka mentioned that earlier in the philosophy it was thought that science has replaced myth in its rationality but nowadays the view is not that straightforward. Lily referred to the problems of categorisations and related to that Timo mentioned how rule-based systems lead into straightforward associations even though only a slight correlation might exist. Conception of rationality has traditionally been bound to words and logic which may lead to even to various forms of racism (the text at the page http://www.mlab.uiah.fi/~timo/runo1.html may illuminate the link).

Next times and place

We decided that the next times will be held at 16 and the lecture room will be abandoned because it tends to cause headache for several people. It was discussed if the reason is in the lights or in the whistling background noise (or something else). The next time will be held either in the meeting room of ML or in Timo's room.

There will be short presentations of the research topics (conversations on general themes will also be continued):

Timo Honkela, 20 Jan 2000