Blog
New SQLite database
We finally have an updated SQLite database for ConceptNet. It's designed for use with ConceptNet 4.0b8 (just released). This will fix the long-standing "best_raw_id" bug.
Verbosity, and one meeeelion sentences
How did we just get nearly 200,000 new statements in Open Mind Common Sense?
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.
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!
Catherine Havasi co-created the Open Mind Common Sense project, as an undergraduate researcher working with Push Singh way back in 1999. For the last five years, she's been working on a doctorate in computational linguistics at Brandeis University. She's been doing a lot of cross-campus research with this group.
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!
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
The theme of this week is "make it so that our underlying code can actually be run by other people". One recent accomplishment: I finally figured out how to make a Windows installer of Divisi, our machine learning library. (The hard work to make Divisi compile on Windows at all was done by contributor Akshay Bhat. Thanks, Akshay.)
Bugfixes and improvements
I know we're a bit quiet on the PR front, but as usual a lot is happening under the hood. You can see what we're up to by watching Launchpad, e.g., Divisi trunk and ConceptNet trunk. I'll highlight a few recent examples:
Speed issues
The Open Mind Common Sense website is currently really, really slow, and I'm sorry about that.
As we acquire more users and try to do more complicated reasoning behind the scenes, clearly what we need to do isspend the piles of money that we have just sitting around on a huge fancy server
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.
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
Also in the realm of new and exciting stuff is our announcement mailing list. It's we'll use it for any big news we have and to announce workshops, symposiums, and software releases.
Subscribe yourself here!
Subscribe yourself here!
Launchpad and Bazaar
We're on Launchpad now. We can host our version control there, track bugs, and answer questions from users.
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.
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.
IUI
Hi everyone!
We've been quite busy lately and I'm going to make a point to update this more often. I really intend to, and since all I have to do this semester is graduate and transition to being a post-doc on top of Open Mind I should have lots of free time. What have we been up to? Well...
We've been quite busy lately and I'm going to make a point to update this more often. I really intend to, and since all I have to do this semester is graduate and transition to being a post-doc on top of Open Mind I should have lots of free time. What have we been up to? Well...
