Thanks to Wired!

Still mad about the changes Facebook made earlier this week?

They’re not done yet.

At the f8 Developers Conference, the company presented its plans for the future.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg started the event by announcing an overhaul of the site’s design. The biggest since 2008.

For every major evolution we’ve done at Facebook, the profile is at the center. It’s a really personal product, and our job is to make this product the best way for you to share everything you want.”

There wasn’t a release date given for the update, dubbed “Timeline,” but a preview has been made available.

Other announcements included the addition of more apps, an increase focus on media, and other elements with a focus on “sharing.”

As users share their dismay with Facebook’s ever-changing nature, developers are continuing to see promise.

EE Graduate Seminar

Intelligent Agents in the OntoAgent Cognitive Architecture

Professor Sergei Nirenburg
Director, Institute for Language and Information Technologies
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

11:30am-12:45pm Friday 30 September 2011, ITE 231

OntoAgent is a constantly evolving cognitive architecture that facilitates development of and experimentation with artificial intelligent agents (ontoagents). Distinguishing characteristics of Ontoagents include the following.

• They model human information processing capabilities by simulating conscious perception and action, which involves reasoning and decision-making;
• They are intended to operate in a hybrid network of human and artificial agents; and
• They incorporate: (a) an ontological world model and a memory (fact repository) of instances of ontological objects, events and properties; (b) OntoSem, a natural language processing module that supports two-way translation between texts (including dialog turns) and their semantic and discourse/pragmatic meanings; (c) a goal- and plan-oriented reasoning module; (d) a decision theory for choosing goals, plans and individual actions that relies on knowledge (beliefs) about self, other agents, the ontological world model, the current world state and memory of past world states and past actions; (e) a capability for verbal, mental and simulated physical action; (f) (optionally) a physiological model, making them what we call double agents with simulated bodies as well as simulated minds and providing an additional channel of perception; and (g) (optionally) personality traits, preferences and psychological states that influence their overtly perceived or subconscious preferences in decision-making.

OntoAgent has so far provided the basis for two proof-of-concept systems:

• Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) modeling a patient and a tutor to help training in medical diagnostics and treatment; and
• CLinicians ADdvisor (CLAD) assisting clinicians by reducing their cognitive load.

This talk will give a brief introduction to OntoAgent functionalities implemented in MVP and CLAD.

Professor Nirenburg has worked in the areas of cognitive systems, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing (NLP) for over 30 years. His professional interests include developing computational models of human cognitive capabilities and implementing them in hybrid-engine models of societies of human and computer agents; computational studies of meaning in natural languages; and representation and management of knowledge about the world and about language. He is Member of the Intl Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) and Honorary Editor of Machine Translation (served as Editor-in-Chief in 1987-96). He has been Program Committee Chair for: Machine Translation Summit III (Washington, DC, 1991), the Conference on Applied NLP sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics (Seattle, WA, 2000), and COLING 2004 in Geneva, Switzerland. He served as a director of two NATO-sponsored Advanced Studies Institutes on Language Engineering for Lesser-Studied Languages (Ankara, Turkey, 2000 and Batumi, Georgia, 2007).

Host: Professor Joel Morris

hey everybody out there in umbcland first of all whats up.

second of all, we hope you came out to all of the i eat things events we've had so far. Beeps-a-palooza went really well, our gig at virgin fest was fantastic, and our most recent invasion of flat tuesday went okay.

so here are some videos to catch you up on what are we doing:

VIRGIN FEST VIDEO

FLAT TUESDAYS VIDEO

Image Courtesy of Clergy Beyond Borders

A rabbi, an imam, and a reverend walk into a room.  Sounds like the opening to a cliche joke.

But this is no joke. This is the mission of Clergy Beyond Borders, a group formed with the goal of promoting religious and cultural pluralism.

In this era of increasing Islam-o-phobia, the group has decided to take their message of tolerance on the road in the USA.

The Reconciliation Ride is a national tour organized to engage communities that have faced religious conflict.

The adventure began on September 11th of this year, and since the kick-off the traveling group has been to 10 different states, 14 cities, and spoken with over 5,000 people in mosques, synagogues, churches, and universities.   The audiences have included a mix of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Baha’i.

One of the tour’s most notable stops took place in Murfressboro, Tennessee.  The town had been a focus of Islam-o-phobia over the past year.

When members of the local Muslim community planned to construct a mosque, other locals objected.  The proposed property became the target of vandals, arsonists and obstructionist lawyers.

Tour participant Rich Eisendorf explained

“This resistance and discrimination isn’t uncommon in many of the places the tour is stopping”

But even in the face of these attitudes, the tour has received warm welcome in cities from Nashville and Chattanooga to Toledo and Cleveland.

In Chattanooga, an Imam’s message of religious tolerance in these difficult times brought 500 people to their feet for a rousing 0vation.

In South Carolina, the clergy team engaged citizens in a discussion about the big question of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict:  Is it possible to reconcile the differences between the two warring factions?

The conversation continued for over an hour and half after the clergy’s talk.  The public found that the less they shied away from important dialogue, the more likely healthy discussions would ensue and bring communities together.

Now, the Reconciliation Ride will come to Frederick for its last stop at St. Katherine Drexel Church and will feature an introduction by Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley.

USDemocrazy will be there covering the event.

Check back on Monday to read more!  In the meantime, leave us your questions for the rabbis, imams, and reverends in the comments below.  What do you think of this plan to fight religious extremism and bring communities together?