Common Sense Computing Initiative

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...

Ken mentioned that we're in the middle of reorganizing the database. I'll fill in some more details about what we're doing.

Currently, our users give their ratings to assertions, the things that make up the links of ConceptNet. Many sentences can yield the same assertion: for example, "dogs are mammals" and "a dog is a kind of mammal" both turn into an assertion that can be expressed as IsA(dog, mammal). The ratings on these assertions are useful to representations such as AnalogySpace.

Hi everyone, I'm Catherine.

I will post some more substantive soon, but first-off I'd like to say we have a facebook group now. I'll hopefully update it with pictures and such as things become available.

In other news Rob, Henry, and I went to AAAI in Chicago to present AnalogySpace which went rather well. I had a great conference and really enjoyed the city of Chicago.

First, thanks to everybody who has been contributing! We're running all sorts of cool analysis stuff with our data, and most everything you put it makes the analysis a bit better. And that's just the beginning...

We've gotten some feedback recently that basically suggests that our interaction with our user community has been lacking. That has definitely ratcheted up in our priorities, and we have a few things in the works. But for the moment, I thought I'd hit on a few items that people have asked about recently.

Hi, I'm Rob.

I've been working on stuff related to Open Mind since 2005, but I've had a bit of a low profile recently, because I thought I was going to go work on a different research project after I finished my master's thesis last year. After several months of dabbling in other projects and getting nowhere interesting, I found myself pulled back into OMCS. Moral of the story: if your grad school career ain't broke, don't fix it.

No news is good news? It seems everything is working well; a few bugs here and there still, but we'll get to them ;)

Feel free to play with the Explore Concepts demo... think Google Sets, but in a semantic network. I'm not sure why the web frontend is slow; the backend code is plenty fast. We'll figure that out sometime; for now, just be patient.

Any bugs, feature requests, ideas, etc., welcome; feel free to comment here.

-Ken

Us and web robots are not getting along well. Our server has gotten overloaded several times recently to the point where we have had to bring it down until things settled. Apologies for the downtime; we'll get this stabilized soon.

But there is a new feature on the site... you're welcome to try it if you can find it, but it's still a little slow.

After fixing the last few bugs (hopefully!), we've turned adding new knowledge back on.

Ever wished your computer could get a clue? Well, now you can now to "Add New Knowledge" and give it one. If you put in something that someone else already said, we'll take it that you agree with them.

Better and more fun ways of clue-giving are coming...

-Ken

For years we've enjoyed tens of thousands of good contributions of from our users, in terms of knowledge and ratings. So we thought that it's about time our users get some feedback from us. This blog is one way that you'll get to hear about what's going on with the site (like, why was it down?) and also see some of the ways that we're using the data you've been giving us.