the-BA : BA Press Release - 4 September 2006 (Child)

Ever wished your computer could respond to your questions like a real person? Rollo Carpenter, Artificial Intelligence (AI) programmer and managing director of Icogno Ltd, and Tim Child, a pioneer of animated virtual beings in entertainment and the founder of Televirtual Ltd, have gone one step further than this to develop George.

George is a practical synergy of the world’s leading conversational AI (or ‘chatbot’) and an animated avatar (a virtual representation of an individual). He can speak questions and responses, and understand the spoken responses and requests of others, be they human or computer. However, unlike his peers or his predecessors, George's AI learns emotions and employs gesture and expression as well as language, allowing him to contextualise his responses in forms that are tantalisingly close to human and making him an entertainer as well as a communicator.

In 2005 George won the ‘most human’ category in the Loebner Prize, the first formal incarnation of the ‘Turing Test’ - an experiment proposed in 1950 by renowned British mathematician Alan Turing, to determine if a machine is actually thinking by observing whether its responses are indistinguishable from those of a human. He is also the first avatar to be interviewed on both radio and television.

Unlike the majority of chatbots, which are bound by programmed rules and therefore finite, the Jabberwacky AI software behind George relies entirely on feedback and uses contextual learning techniques to improve his conversation. This means that he stores everything everyone has ever said to him and finds the most appropriate thing to say by matching a user’s input to patterns stored in his database. In this way he can learn foreign languages, slang, word games, jokes and any other form of identifiable language trait and will respond appropriately if he has enough to go on.

On 25 August, Carpenter’s Jabberwacky AI software passed the landmark figure of 10 million entries to its database, a good number of them not in English, as it has now learnt to speak about 40 languages. Carpenter himself is optimistic that within the next 10 years conversational AI will consistently be able to pass the rigorous questioning and analyses imposed during a formal Turing Test and that contextual learning techniques are the most likely to succeed.

“George is sometimes anarchic, often acerbic and almost always amusing,” says Child. “He 'borrows' a little intelligence from every interaction with a real person, so that time spent with him offers a unique insight into how natural language science is capable of reproducing patterns of human behaviour, and progressing towards true machine intelligence.”

Carpenter and Child will discuss all these issues in a panel with George himself on Thursday as part of ‘Virtual humans: real communication’, an event at the BA Festival of Science, taking place in Norwich from 2-9 September and bringing together over 300 of the UK’s top scientists and engineers to discuss the latest scientific developments with the public. In addition, George will be available for TV, Radio and Press interviews throughout the Festival.

In late September, George will be granted access to the web, while another of Carpenter’s AI creations will defend his title at the 2006 Loebner Challenge Turing test finals in London on September 16-17.

ENDS

This year’s Festival is supported by the University of East Anglia, the East of England Development Agency and Microsoft Research. The Press Centre is sponsored by AstraZeneca.

For further information on the BA Festival of Science, visit www.the-ba.net/festivalofscience.

For more information on George (including images and TV and Radio clips of the ‘man’ himself), visit www.televirtual.com/george.htm

Reproduction quality images of George are available on request from Luke@televirtual.com

George can be contacted at the Festival via Tim Child on 07885 433507 and 01603 431030

For further information please contact:

Lisa Hendry, Press Assistant, the BA
Tel: +44 (0)20 7019 4946
Email: lisa.hendry@the-ba.net

Note for editors

1. The BA (British Association for the Advancement of Science) is the UK's nationwide, open membership organisation that exists to advance the public understanding, accessibility and accountability of the sciences and engineering. Established in 1831, the BA organises major initiatives across the UK, including the annual BA Festival of Science, National Science Week, programmes of regional and local events, and an extensive programme for young people in schools and colleges. For more information about the BA, please visit www.the-ba.net.

2. Speakers have been asked to submit press papers for their talks, which include a summary of the talk and what is newsworthy about their research. Press papers will be available from mid-August at www.the-ba.net/presspapers.

3. To register for access to the press papers or to the Press Centre at the 2006 BA Festival of Science, visit www.the-ba.net/pressregister.

4. The BA Festival of Science 2006 is being hosted in Norwich by the University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park and Norwich City Council.

5. The University of East Anglia (UEA) is an internationally renowned, research-led University. Over 13,000 students from more than 100 countries and around 2500 staff enjoy its architecturally distinguished campus on the edge of the city of Norwich. UEA is known for its pioneering and collaborative approach to research, bringing together academics from different disciplines to create innovative research groups. The latest Research Assessment Exercise (2001) confirmed the breadth and depth of UEA's research excellence through the achievement of the top 5* or 5 ratings in eleven subject areas, with staff inclusion rates in the top 10% across the board.

6. The East of England Development Agency (EEDA) is the driving force behind sustainable economic regeneration in the East of England: Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Its vision is to create a leading economy, founded on a world class knowledge base, creativity and enterprise to improve the quality of life for all who live and work here. EEDA aims to do this by: (1) Setting and shaping the direction of economic development in the region, (2) Persuading and influencing others to bring resources together, (3) Investing in imaginative projects that challenge the norm. For further information visit www.eeda.org.uk.

7. Founded in 1991, Microsoft Research is dedicated to conducting both basic and applied research in computer science and software engineering. Its goals are to enhance the user experience on computing devices, reduce the cost of writing and maintaining software, and invent novel computing technologies. Researchers focus on more than 55 areas of computing and collaborate with leading academic, government and industry researchers to advance the state of the art in such areas as graphics, speech recognition, user-interface research, natural language processing, programming tools and methodologies, operating systems and networking, and the mathematical sciences. Microsoft Research employs more than 700 people in five labs located in Redmond, Wash.; Silicon Valley, Calif.; Cambridge, England; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India. Microsoft Research collaborates openly with colleges and universities worldwide to enhance the teaching and learning experience, inspire technological innovation, and broadly advance the field of computer science. More information can be found at www.research.microsoft.com.

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