Overview
When people communicate, they rely on a large body of shared common sense knowledge in order to understand each other. Many barriers we face today in artificial intelligence and user interface design are due to the fact that computers do not share this knowledge. To improve computers' understanding of the world that people live in and talk about, we need to provide them with usable knowledge about the basic relationships between things that nearly every person knows.
In 1999, we began a project at the MIT Media Lab to collect common sense from volunteers on the internet. Nearly ten years later our project has expanded to encompass many different areas, languages, and problems. Currently, the English site has over a million sentences from over 15,000 contributors.
New SQLite database
Verbosity, and one meeeelion sentences
We've just imported a whole lot of data from Verbosity, one of Luis von Ahn's Games with a Purpose. Verbosity collects common sense knowledge through a game: one person is given a word, and needs to get the other person to guess that word by listing common-sense facts about it.
Welcome back, Catherine Havasi!
Last month, she finally earned her Ph.D (congratulations!). Now, she's returned to the Media Lab as a post-doc, where she'll once again be able to work on Open Mind and its applications full time. It's great to have her as an official part of the group again!
Divisi for Windows
Bugfixes and improvements
Speed issues
As we acquire more users and try to do more complicated reasoning behind the scenes, clearly what we need to do is
Sorry, I meant to say: clearly what we need to do is keep finding ways to cache lots of stuff and using whatever computing power we can find. Anyway, I'm working on it.
New Mailing List
Subscribe yourself here!
Launchpad and Bazaar
For people who work on Open Mind within the Media Lab (and possibly even others), here's a guide to hacking on the code using Bazaar.
