Chatbots 3.3 Conference

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Mar 29, 2013 in Software

The Gathering

The legends and current elites of AIML and Turing AI (not necessarily disjoint groups) met for their yearly gathering at Seed Philly, a Philadelphia tech startup incubator, located in the heart of Center City.

The Chatbots 3.3 conference was a fast flowing event with exciting flash-talk style presentations, always followed by Q&A segments. The amazing speaker lineup included several Loebner Prize winners, AIML Engine developers, VCs, Psychiatrists, Artificial Intelligence researcher, and best-selling authors.

Dr. Richard Wallace

The Highlights

Dr. Richard Wallace, Loebner Prize Winner 2000, 2001, 2004 and father of AIML, talked about the new AIML 2.0 Specification that focuses much on making AIML more succinct, while maintaining its simplicity. He stated that it currently took about 10,000 AIML categories to create a believable character. ALICE for instance has about 100,000 categories and the PROFESSOR, a bot with one of the largest AIML knowledge bases, has about 580,000 AIML categories. Writing that many categories is not only very time consuming (experienced AIML authors may be able to write one category per minute) but also requires a memory capacity, not available on many embedded and mobile devices. AIML 2.0 therefore tries to make AIML more efficient, allowing the creation of a believable character with as little as 1/6 of the categories needed before.

Artist on Android w/ Voice Recognition

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Feb 21, 2013 in Android

Pandering to the Lowest Common Denominator of public taste?

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Jun 3, 2012 in Android

I recently had the chance to attend a CommNexus event in San Diego, titled “PhoneGap vs. Titanium: What Is the Best Tool to Build an HTML5 Mobile App?”

Two panelists and a moderator were battling it out, comparing the two frameworks, mentioned benefits, and also demo-ed the mobile applications they had built.

The event-title of course was a little misleading, since you would be using JavaScript and not HTML5, if Titanium were your framework of choice. Its heavy focus on JavaScript should make Titanium more suitable for applications that are heavy on processing logic.

Write once, run anywhere, Web vs. App – Same argument, different outcome?

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Sep 28, 2010 in Software

Developing native applications for mobile devices is expensive, especially when considering that at least two (iPhone, Android) if not more (BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, Palm WebOS, Nokia Maemo, Samsung Bada) versions have to be created. Sounds like a mobile Web Application, i.e. a Web site that is optimized for viewing on the iPhone, Android, etc., is an easy, inexpensive, and quick way to avoid costly mobile application development. Moreover, on the Desktop, the Rich-Client-Application versus Web-Application debate was decisively won long ago, by AJAX powered WebApps like gmail.com, mint.com, etc

It’s the Mobile User, stupid

What is it with these mobile phone users, why aren’t they getting the message that web-apps are cool and native-apps are a lame remembrance of the past?

The mobile experience is still hampered by an unreliable and often slow cell-network, which at times (inside Airplanes, geographic location / coverage map) may not be available at all. Even more importantly, size, performance, battery-life, and data-input capabilities, significantly influence the usability of a mobile device. And much more than on the Desktop, Privacy, Data-transfer Costs, and Power-consumption are always on the mind of the mobile user.

What’s not good enough needs to be optimized; and only what’s already good enough can be disintegrated and modularized

Web applications have come a long way and (at least on fast Laptop and Desktop machines) Web browsers perform stunningly. Web applications have been disintegrated, following the principal of separation of concerns. I.e. the content it stored in HTML document, the presentation is defined in CSS cascading style sheets, and the interaction and validation behavior is defined in JavaScript files. All these kinds of documents are downloaded and interpreted by the Web browser at runtime. Additionally AJAX with the information being encoded in JSON or XML before transfer, allows the Web browser application to communicate with the Web server at will.

All this works beautifully on the Desktop, with a fast multi gigahertz processor and multi megabits per second constant Internet connection. However, mobile users prefer a different approach, one that is optimized instead of prematurely disintegrated.

A mobile application once installed is immediately available. Like the gmail application or the usatoday application for instance, it may have cached information from the last session i.e. it is useful even before connecting to the server. Since connectivity must still be considered unreliable and not constantly available, the mobile experience gains greatly from information caching. Providing a useful experience without requiring a constant connection to the server also address two other concerns: data-transfer cost and power-consumption.

User Interaction

The User Experience however has to be optimized above all other concerns. Given the still cumbersome data entry procedure (gestures, keyboard, virtual keypad, voice recognition), mobile users need to be empowered to get to their information destination with as little input / interaction as possible.

Content versus Service

When on a Desktop, users perceive the Web as source for content, when using a mobile phone, the Web becomes the source for services.

Only native mobile application have full access to the inherent features of the mobile device, features important enough that the user chose that particular device over any other. That alone however doesn’t explain why users, if given a choice, overwhelmingly prefer applications over web-apps

Moreover, recently some great solution for Web developers (like PhoneGap) became available, to Web-enable native device functionality with HTML, CSS and JavaScript,

Still, native application can address the mobile user’s concerns as well as the shortcoming of the mobile experience much better than mobile web applications. Native applications are (much) more expensive to build but you are giving your mobile users what you paid for.

Theodore, set free at last

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Nov 26, 2009 in Java

Theodore Editor

Way back in fall 2002, I had discovered Thinlets, which I liked for its lean approach. However, because it lacked tools and extensibility, I couldn’t really use it for more serious projects. Still, the concept was intriguing, and while reimplementing it in a more object-oriented and extensible fashing wasn’t an option, the least I could do, was to write an editor .. meet Theodore.

After I had written Theodore 1.0, I was even more convinced that Graphical User Interfaces should be described in XML documents that are parsed and rendered into widgets at runtime, a concept which should become known as the declarative UI paradigm. So in January 2003 I founded the Swixmlopen source project (www.swixml.org) to combine the benefits of Swing (availability of models, extensibility of widgets etc.) with the lean XUL-approach, demonstrated by the Thinlet project.

While my focus was clearly on Swixml, I still kept the Thinled Editor up to date, and eventually released the significantly updated Theodore 3.0 – IDE for Thinlet Developers, which was built with (and shiped with) the classic Thinlet.jar.

Today, Theodore is set free, turns freeware, i.e. there is no freeware editon anymore. The full-featured Theodore 3.0 AP Edition is available for download at http://wolfpaulus.com/software/theodore/ (the webstart version as been updated as well).

Wolf Paulus

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