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Thompson Reuters announced on their blog (Life in the Linked Data Cloud: Calais Release 4) that their next release of the Calais web-based information extraction services will support linked data.

I guess this is the ultimate question for a Turing Test. At least for this Fall.

Reporter Will Pavia of The Times was one of the judges a the 2008 Loebner Prize competition last week. In a story in The Times yesterday, Machine takes on man at mass Turing Test, he revealed his question that gave away one of the cold, lifeless, mechanical bots.

None of the six bots that made the Loebner Prize Competition finals won the prize, but Fred Roberts’ Elbot was declared the best of the lot, winning a bronze metal. Only five of the bots managed to start.

In this week’s ebiquity meeting (10:30am Tue Oct 14), PhD student Shenyong Zhang will present his recent work with Yun Peng on SMOOTY, a new efficient method for modifying a joint probability distribution to satisfy a set of inconsistent constraints. It extends the well-known “iterative proportional fitting procedure” (IPFP) which only works with consistent constraints. Compared to existing methods, SMOOTH is computationally more efficient and insensitive to data.

On Sunday October 12, six computer chatterbots will sit down with six human judges at the University of Reading and try to convince them that they are not machines, but humans. The winner might take away the grand Loebner Prize worth $100,000. The Loebner Prize competition is a modified and simplified Turing test intended as a measure of machine intelligence. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it.

Conrad Barski, M.D. will give a talk on “How To Tell Stuff To Your Computer — The Enigmatic Art of Knowledge Representation” at UMBC at 1:00pm on Friday 17 October in Lecture Hall 8 in the ITE building.

The NYT has an interesting article, Stuck in Google’s Doghouse, on the importance of search engines to many businesses. Or maybe it’s about ad arbitrage and the ways that some Web business models are based on gaming search engines and Web advertising. In any case, it’s especially relevant in the light of the recently announced Google-Yahoo advertising deal.

The Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) has begun the process of selecting a site for the 9th International Semantic Web Conference to be held in 2010. Since ISWC’08 will be located in Karhsruhe Germany and ISWC’09 in the DC area in the US, locations in Asia and Australia are preferred for 2010.

Here at Ebiquity, we’ve had a number of great grad students. One of them, Akshay Java, hacked out a search engine for twitter posts around early April last year, and named it twitterment. He blogged about it here first. He did it without the benefit of the XMPP updates, by parsing the public timeline.

The WSJ has an article, Get Out of Your Own Way, on research suggesting that people have often form intentions to act and make decisions well before they are conscious of the fact. Maybe this is like detecting the inferences made by the OWL reasoner or classification of a low-level SVM model before the high-level Python code processes its results. This picture from the article sums it up nicely.

Venture Beat reports that Microsoft will acquire Powerset for a price “rumored to be slightly more than $100 million”. Powerset has been developing a Web search system that uses natural language processing technology acquired from PARC to more fully understand user’s queries and the text of documents indexed.

The June 2008 IEEE Spectrum is a special report on The Singularity which has many short and provocative articles available online. This is what Wikipedia calls the technological singularity.

Colin de la Higuera of Jean Monnet University will talk on “ Grammatical Inference: Some of the Questions Out There ” at 1:00pm next Tuesday in the large CSEE conference room.

MarsPhoenix is twittering from the North polar region of Mars.

Here’s a great picture of my deployed arm with the scoop on the end: http://tinyurl.com/3s354p I can’t wait to dig in the dirt next week. 10:14 PM May 29, 2008 from web

Phoenix is even carrying on conversations with some of its more than 10,000 followers.

Faviki is a new social bookmarking system that uses Wikipedia articles for tags. It actually uses URLS in the DBpedia namespace that correspond to Wikipedia pages. The immediate benefits of this approach are several: